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