Improve Domain Search Accuracy in Clay: Solutions Explained

We have two fields per company:

“Primary domain”: exactly one domain (e.g., example.com)

“Additional domains”: multiple domains separated by semicolons (e.g., alpha.com; beta.com; example.com)

The problem: Simple text search creates substring matches. That means “blechtechnik.de” is incorrectly found inside “munichblechtechnik.de,” even though it’s a different domain.

Root cause: “Additional domains” is stored as one long string. Without proper tokenization (splitting), comparisons happen on text, not on discrete domain entries.

The solution:

1) Split the “Additional domains” string on semicolons to get individual tokens.

2) Trim each token and (optionally) lowercase for case-insensitive comparison.

3) Check for exact equality between the “Primary domain” and any token (no substring matching).

4) Depending on your need: count total exact matches, or count how many rows contain at least one exact match.

Outcome: No more false positives from substrings; only true, full domain matches are identified.