Blog

Get the Latest

News, tips and tricks

Bringing more transparency to the IP to Company API

Today we're launching a significant update to our IP to Company API that will bring more value and transparency to the system.

Before

When talking to customers, we found that the same questions come up over and over again:

  • What is your match rate?
  • Why isn't there any data for X IP?
  • How do you compare to Clearbit Reveal?

These are great questions, and the answer is that "it's complicated".

Matching Company's to IPs

Determining what company is associated with a particular IP address is a tricky problem. We explain more about how matching works in a another blog post, but to summarize, matching is generally broken up into two groups:

  1. Matches using publicly available data (ASN/WHOIS)
  2. Fuzzy matches that are essentially a provider's best prediction

For better or for worse, in many cases it's near to impossible to confidently match a single company to an IP. Examples can include people using using a VPN, Tor, or working out of a coworking office.

So our initial approach was to set a high threshold and hide any matches that didn't meet this bar, along with the low level IP data that played into the decision. This naturally resulted in a lower "match rate", and unfortunately, the occasional poor first experience for new users. It's not very inspiring to try out our API and potentially see no data.

Clearbit Reveal

If you're reading this, you're likely familiar with Clearbit Reveal. Reveal has become popular over the last several years, and it's fair to say they are the market leader.

While our initial API design took inspiration from their approach, in contrast to BigPicture, Clearbit's match rate is noticeably higher. In fact, when benchmarking their API, it's able to return a "match" for most IPs.

The problem is that there's no way to verify this data. Nor does Clearbit provide any measure of how confident they are in the data they are returning. Furthermore, when inspecting the results, it quickly becomes obvious that in many cases the reported match is highly unlikely or simply false. In talking to organizations looking for a Clearbit alternative, many have to come to the same conclusion.

The New IP API

When speaking with customers about what we could do to improve, Jimmy Guerrero, now VP of Marketing at Arrikto, put it plainly, "just give me all the data".

Our new API empowers customers with greater insights, transparency, and control. We now return a confidence score for the company match, along with an evolving collection of the low level data powering the decision. From there, customers can decide on their own what to do with it.

{
    "ip": "204.4.143.118",
    "type": "business",
    "fuzzy": false,
    "confidence": 0.95,
    "geo": {
        "city": "London",
        "state": "England",
        "stateCode": "ENG",
        "country": "United Kingdom",
        "countryCode": "GB",
        "continent": "Europe",
        "continentCode": "EU",
        "isEU": true
    },
    "company": {
        "id": "535384f0-e5f0-4a5c-9aeb-339e8304e18f",
        "domain": "goldmansachs.com",
        "name": "Goldman Sachs Group",
        "legalName": "The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.",
        "logo": "http://logo.bigpicture.io/logo/goldmansachs.com",
        "url": "https://www.goldmansachs.com/",
        "tags": [
            "Finance",
            "Financial Services",
            "FinTech"
        ],
        "//": "..."
    },
    "whois": {
        "domain": "ny.email.gs.com",
        "name": "The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc."
    },
    "asn": {
        "asn": "AS9084",
        "name": "European AS",
        "route": "204.4.143.0/24"
    }
}

Next Steps

The API is still evolving, and there's various areas we can improve on. So try it out and let us know what you think!

You can read more about the new API in our documentation or try it out directly at the endpoint below:

curl 'https://ip.bigpicture.io/v2/companies/ip?ip=204.4.143.118' \  
  -H 'Authorization: {API_KEY}'