--- title: "Content fingerprint" summary: "A content fingerprint is a hash of the meaningful content of a submitted record, used to recognise that the same thing has been sent before regardless of when, in what order, or under what key." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/content-fingerprint last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Content fingerprint > A content fingerprint is a hash of the meaningful content of a submitted record, used to recognise that the same thing has been sent before regardless of when, in what order, or under what key. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/content-fingerprint Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Decisions and evidence ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under decisions and evidence](https://entitybind.com/glossary#decisions). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What content fingerprint means A content fingerprint is a hash that stands for the meaningful content of a record. It is computed after normalisation, over the fields that carry identity, so that two submissions differing only in whitespace, key order or a formatting artefact hash to the same value. That property is what makes it useful for billing and for replay: it recognises sameness of content rather than sameness of bytes on the wire. It differs from a cache key in two ways. A cache key is usually keyed by time and expires; a fingerprint is stable for as long as the thing it identifies exists. And a fingerprint is derived by the server from the content, never supplied by the client, because a client-supplied identifier is a claim about sameness rather than evidence of it. The operational consequences are pleasant. Repeated submissions are free and deterministic, a re-run of a failed batch does not double a bill, and the erasure story is tractable, because the fingerprints for a tenant's submitted content are enumerable and deletable alongside the records themselves. Entity Bind derives a content fingerprint server-side when a record is stored, uses it as the basis of zero-cost replay, and deletes the fingerprint index alongside the content it identifies when a tenant's data is erased. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [The API reference](https://entitybind.com/api): The REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field. - [Security and tenancy](https://entitybind.com/trust): Credentials, tenancy, retention and what is not held, answered before the questionnaire arrives. - [Pricing and the credit rule](https://entitybind.com/pricing): What a decision costs, what a deep attempt costs, and the three things that cost nothing at all. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Replay](https://entitybind.com/glossary/replay): Replay is re-serving a previous decision for byte-identical content rather than recomputing it, which makes repeated submissions free and deterministic — provided the replayed decision is still one the system would stand behind. - [Idempotency](https://entitybind.com/glossary/idempotency): An operation is idempotent when performing it repeatedly has the same effect as performing it once, which is what makes a retry after a timeout safe rather than duplicating work. - [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record): A record is one observation of an entity from one source at one time — the unit that arrives, is compared and is attached, never the unit that is trusted on its own. - [Decision receipt](https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt): A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [Snowflake](https://entitybind.com/integrations/snowflake) (Integration): An integration pattern over the HTTP API rather than a connector. Unload the rows, post them in requests of up to 500, and load the results back. ## The other 8 terms on this shelf What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor) - [Abstention](https://entitybind.com/glossary/abstention) - [Review queue](https://entitybind.com/glossary/review-queue) - [Decision receipt](https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt) - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance) - [Citation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/citation) - [Idempotency](https://entitybind.com/glossary/idempotency) - [Replay](https://entitybind.com/glossary/replay) Previous, alphabetically: [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor) · Next, alphabetically: [Crosswalk](https://entitybind.com/glossary/crosswalk) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/content-fingerprint, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.