Choose a surface
Decide between person research, People Sets, synchronous APIs, CLI, and MCP.
Person research
Choose POST /v1/person when you have one person to research and need a reviewed report, professional history, source links, and field-level provenance.
Good examples:
- Confirm a prospect's identity and current role before outreach.
- Gather evidence-backed interests and public presence for personalization.
People Sets
Choose People Sets when the deliverable is a persistent, criteria-verified dataset built over multiple steps. Sets run asynchronously, verify every criterion, emit progress, and export results. They are in preview and available to API keys with the people:search scope; imports, enrichment columns, and monitors are workspace-only for now.
Synchronous search
Choose POST /v1/search for a fast one-shot list of up to 150 people. It is useful for interactive autocomplete, small cohorts, and low-latency agent tools.
Enrichment
Choose the enrichment APIs when you already know the identity and need selected profile, email, phone, or social fields.
CLI
Choose the CLI for terminal exploration, local scripts, manual QA, and smoke tests.
MCP
Choose the hosted MCP server when people research should
be available as native tools inside ChatGPT, Claude, or another MCP client. Add
https://api.ploid.com/mcp; Ploid handles sign-in and scoped workspace access.
A useful rule
Use the highest-level surface that naturally matches the user's request. Reach for a lower-level endpoint only when your application needs tighter control over the workflow.