Playbook: Company Name Cleaning

All rules here are best practice, not law. Override any of them when the campaign calls for it; note the best practice once and move on.

0. Read this first: the AI prompt is a toggle, not the default

Clay ships a free, deterministic Normalize Company Name action (titleCase: true). That is the default and it stays the default. Do not replace it reflexively, and do not make AI the default.

Everything below — the locked prompt, the benchmark, the placeholder guard, the AI column — is the toggle: what you switch on for one client, when the copy leans hard on the company name and the raw strings are messy in ways a normalizer structurally cannot fix. Those are taglines after a pipe, dba entities, parenthetical descriptors, appended city names, second-language duplicates, and junk strings that need an abstain.

Turn the toggle ON when all three are true: