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Keyword Filters

How include / exclude keyword search works across BlitzAPI Search endpoints, plus the exact-match bracket syntax.
Agents & LLMs: a Markdown version of this page is available by appending .md to the URL, and the full documentation index is at llms.txt.
.include and .exclude filters are used as keyword search filters. The phrases in one array work as OR filters. Inside one phrase, all words must appear in the value, in any order (see How a phrase matches).
For example, if you want to look for “Director” in the search results, you can use the following filter:
Giving:
This will result in the following search:

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How a phrase matches

A phrase with more than one word is not searched as a fixed string. These rules apply to every include / exclude value without brackets, for example job titles in Find People and Waterfall ICP:
  • All words must appear. "Head Marketing" needs both head and marketing in the title.
  • The word order is free. "Head Marketing" matches Marketing Head as well as Head of Marketing.
  • Words match as whole words. "Demand Gen" does not match Demand Generation, and "grow" does not match growth.
  • Nothing is stemmed or expanded. There are no synonyms, no abbreviation expansion (VP is not Vice President) and no stop-word removal, so of counts as a word when you write it.
  • Case and accents are ignored. "Céo" and "ceo" are the same word.
  • Hyphens and punctuation split words. Co-CEO is read as co + ceo, so the phrase "CEO" also matches it.
  • The phrases in one array are OR’d. A value matches as soon as one of the phrases matches.
To cover the variants of a title, list each form as its own phrase, for example ["VP Demand Gen", "VP Demand Generation", "Vice President Demand Generation"]. Phrases in one array are OR’d, so any of them can match.

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Exact Match Syntax

On top of the regular keyword search, you can also use the exact match syntax. Wrap a value in square brackets to switch to exact match: "[CEO]" matches only values whose lowercased, unaccented form equals "ceo". The bracket syntax works in both include and exclude, and you can mix it in the same array — e.g. ["[CEO]", "Founder"] means exact "ceo" OR keyword "Founder".