Public API

The Clay Public API

Beyond the CLI, Clay exposes a Public API you can develop against directly over HTTP. Reach for it when building a service, app, or integration — not for one-off agent tasks in a shell (use the cli skill for those).

What it offers

• Search — find people or companies in Clay's GTM database with advanced queries: criteria from the fields catalog, cross-entity filters, and nested Boolean logic. See the searches skill for search behavior and the CLI equivalent. Prefer the CLI for one-off searches.
• Tables — structured queries against Clay tables.
• Routines / batches — async routine and batch runs.

Auth

The public API needs its own key — the credential from clay login is not scoped for it. Issue a dedicated public-API key with the CLI:

clay api-keys create --name "<name>"   # → { ..., "apiKey": "<secret>" }

CLI-created keys are always scoped to the public API. The apiKey secret is returned only once, at creation — store it immediately; it can't be retrieved later. Send it as a Bearer token against https://api.clay.com/public/v0. Manage existing keys with clay api-keys list | update | delete.

Reference

Full developer documentation — Public API reference, CLI reference, concepts, and the OpenAPI spec — lives at:

• https://developers.clay.com/llms.txt

Fetch that first to get exact endpoints, request/response shapes, pagination, and rate limits before writing integration code.