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Getting Started

In order to use our Person Retrieve API, you must have an active API key. You can look up your API key by logging into our self-serve dashboard and going to the API Keys section.
Need an API Key?If you don’t have an API key, you can easily create one by signing up for a self-serve account. Check out our Self-Serve Quickstart Guide, which walks you through the sign-up process as well as shows you how to use the self-serve API dashboard.

Simple Example

As mentioned in the Overview, the Person Retrieve API is a way to directly look up records from our Person Dataset. In order to use the Person Retrieve API, you will need to know thePDL Person ID of the person that you want to look up. Here’s a quick example that demonstrates retrieving a record with a person_id of qEnOZ5Oh0poWnQ1luFBfVw_0000:
Note: Common MistakesWhen using the Person Retrieve API, there are a couple common mistakes, such as:
  • Using an ID that does not refer to a person profile (such as a company or school ID)
  • Passing the ID as a URL parameter rather than part of the URL path. For example, using:
    • Incorrect: v5/person/retrieve?person_id=<PDL_PERSON_ID>
    • Correct: v5/person/retrieve/<PDL_PERSON_ID>
The API returns the full person profile if the person_id exists in our dataset:
JSON
To see Sean’s full profile that would be returned in the data object, check out our Example Person Record. If you don’t get this response, check out our Errors page for more information.