Deduplication strategy

When to use it

You have visible duplicates and merging feels risky — because it is. Merges are permanent in HubSpot, so plan survivorship before touching anything.

The prompt

Help me design a deduplication plan for HubSpot [companies/contacts]. Our situation: [DESCRIBE — e.g. 8,000 companies, duplicates from a list import and a Salesforce migration, some have open deals]. Produce: 1) Match keys to identify duplicates, in order of confidence (domain, name+country, etc.) with the false-positive risk of each. 2) Survivorship rules — for each important property, which record's value wins and why. 3) The order to merge in, and which merges must be reviewed by a human rather than automated. 4) What HubSpot's native merge does with associations, activity history and form submissions, and the gotchas to check before bulk-merging. Ask about our setup where it changes the plan.

How to use it

1. 1Describe your duplicate situation in the placeholder — source of duplicates matters.
2. 2Review the match keys and test the highest-confidence one on 20 known duplicates.
3. 3Merge a small batch manually against the survivorship rules before automating anything.
4. 4Fix the source (form logic, import hygiene) so duplicates stop being created.

Tips

• Never bulk-merge records with open deals without a human review step.
• Company domain is the strongest match key — clean it first (the audit prompt helps).
• Keep the export from before the merge; it is your only undo.

Related resources