Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Anchord, AnchorIDs, identity resolution, guard writes, and integrations.
What is Anchord?
Anchord is a read-only identity resolution and write-guard layer for AI agents and data pipelines. It resolves records to canonical identities called AnchorIDs, evaluates proposed writes, and escalates ambiguity to humans.
What is an AnchorID?
An AnchorID is Anchord's canonical identity record for a Company or Person. Source records from HubSpot, Salesforce, Stripe, and other systems are matched to AnchorIDs through rules-based scoring. AnchorIDs accumulate identifiers from linked source records over time, improving matching as more data flows through the system.
Does Anchord write to my CRM?
No. Anchord is read-only by design. It ingests data and evaluates writes, but never writes back to external systems. Your agent or pipeline performs the actual write based on Anchord's decision.
What happens when identity is ambiguous?
Anchord returns needs_review instead of guessing. The case is queued in the Review Queue with candidate matches, confidence scores, and a recommendation. A human confirms, dismisses, or creates a new entity. The agent retries after resolution.
How does guard/write work?
The guard endpoint evaluates a proposed write against a resolved entity. It returns allowed: true if the write is safe, or allowed: false with a blocks array containing specific block codes (e.g. ENTITY_NOT_FOUND, NO_CANONICAL_LINK). Guard is evaluation-only.
What integrations does Anchord support?
Anchord has built-in OAuth connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot, and Stripe — including support for multiple instances of the same provider (e.g. two Salesforce orgs). You can also register custom sources and push records from any system via the batch ingest API.
How is Anchord different from a CDP?
Anchord resolves identity and evaluates writes. It does not store marketing audiences, run campaigns, build customer profiles, or manage data pipelines. It sits between your agent and the systems it writes to.
What is needs_review?
needs_review is a resolve status returned when Anchord finds multiple plausible matches within a close confidence margin. It signals that a human should decide which entity is correct before the agent writes.
How does duplicate detection work?
Anchord uses rules-based scoring to identify near-duplicate records across all connected sources. Duplicates are clustered with confidence levels and score breakdowns. You can merge them via the API (with dry-run support) or the console. Merged entities combine identifiers from both records.
What are Trust Ops?
Trust Ops is Anchord's core billing metric. It equals the total number of identity resolve calls plus guard/write evaluation calls per month.
Is Anchord deterministic?
Yes. Scoring is rules-based — domain, email, provider IDs, name + location, with multi-signal corroboration for ambiguous cases. Exact domain matches score highest. A three-tier pipeline (exact match, fuzzy reconciliation, human review) ensures nothing is guessed. Matching analytics let you verify and tune over time.
Can I use Anchord with AI agents?
Yes. Anchord provides a REST API and an 11-tool MCP server compatible with Cursor, Claude Desktop, and other MCP clients. The typical agent workflow is: ingest a record, resolve its identity, guard the proposed write, then write or stop.
What is golden-record enrichment?
AnchorID entities accumulate identifiers from every linked source record over time — emails, domains, and external system IDs. This means matching improves as more data flows through the system, without manual intervention.
Can I connect multiple instances of the same provider?
Yes. You can connect multiple Salesforce orgs, HubSpot portals, or Stripe accounts to the same tenant. Each instance has its own label, sync status, and health monitoring. The review queue and target projection show which instance each record came from. This is especially useful after an acquisition when you need to resolve overlapping identities across the acquired company's systems and your own.
Can Anchord help with post-acquisition CRM cleanup?
Yes. Connect all inherited CRM instances (e.g. both Salesforce orgs) to one Anchord tenant, ingest records from all of them, and resolve overlapping identities to canonical AnchorIDs. Anchord shows you the overlap, flags ambiguous matches for human review, and recommends merges — all without writing back to any system. Migration and cleanup writes remain under your control.