How duplicate records are measured and removed

"Duplicates" can mean three different things. We treat them separately.

1. Exact duplicate rows inside a pack

Two rows are exact duplicates when every column matches after trimming spaces and ignoring letter case. Our inventory scanner fingerprints every row of every pack and counts exact duplicates automatically. The total is shown on each dataset page as "Exact duplicate rows found inside packs". This is a measured figure, not an estimate.

2. Near duplicates

The same business can appear twice with small differences: "Example Ltd" vs "Example Limited", or a phone number written with and without the country code. Detecting these requires normalisation (see our guide to normalising phone numbers) and matching rules. Where the operator reports how many near-duplicates were removed during processing, the page shows that figure labelled "reported by operator". Where it has not been measured, the page says "Not currently measured" — we do not publish invented numbers.

3. Repeat purchases

Buying twice from the same dataset never delivers the same pack twice to the same account. See How SmartPacks work.

De-duplicating on your side

When you combine several packs, run a duplicate check keyed on a normalised phone number or website domain. Our free CSV duplicate checker runs entirely in your browser and never uploads the file.