Guide
Skip tracing vs people search vs data enrichment
Three terms, mostly the same data, very different products. Knowing the difference saves you from buying the wrong tool.
Skip tracing, people search, and data enrichment all draw from the same general identity-graph data but they're packaged for very different buyers and use cases. Buying the wrong category for your use case wastes money and sometimes creates legal exposure.
People search
People search is the consumer-facing GUI category: Spokeo, BeenVerified, TruePeopleSearch, Whitepages. The buyer is a private individual looking up a friend, a family member, an old acquaintance, or maybe a date. The product is a website where you type in a name and get a result page.
People search products are usually cheap or freemium, optimized for browsing, and explicitly not built for FCRA-regulated decisions (their terms say so). They're not great for high-volume professional use because the workflows are GUI-based and the per-record cost adds up fast.
Skip tracing
Skip tracing is the professional, vertical-specific framing of the same data. The buyer is a real estate investor, debt collector, process server, or PI. The product is usually an API plus bulk CSV upload, sometimes with a thin GUI layer. The pricing is per-record, structured for higher volume, and the data is usually higher quality because the buyer cares about accuracy and is willing to pay for it.
Data enrichment
Data enrichment is the same data again, framed for SaaS / sales / marketing use cases. The buyer is a marketing operations team, a SaaS product manager, or a data engineer. The product is an API, the framing is "fill in missing fields on existing records," and the use cases are lead enrichment, customer onboarding, list cleanup, and analytics.
Same data, different framing — does that matter?
Yes, in three ways:
Pricing. Consumer people search is sold by the search ($1+ each) or by monthly subscription. Skip tracing and enrichment are sold per lookup ($0.01–$0.20). Same data, very different unit economics.
Permissible purpose. The consumer-facing terms on people search products usually disclaim FCRA-regulated uses entirely. Professional skip tracing and enrichment vendors work with you on permissible purpose framing.
Volume + integration. APIs scale, GUIs don't. If you're doing more than a few hundred lookups a month, you want an API.
Which one do you actually need?
- Looking up one person for personal reasons → people search (Spokeo, BeenVerified)
- Cold marketing to property owners or debtors at volume → skip tracing API (us, BatchData, Tracerfy)
- Filling in missing phones/emails on a SaaS customer record → data enrichment API (us, Clearbit, ZoomInfo's enrichment tier)