---
title: Merging contacts
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/contact-management/working-with-contacts.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

> **Info:** **Enterprise license required**
>
> Features described on this page require the **Kentico Xperience Enterprise** license.

In some cases, multiple [contacts](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/contact-management/working-with-contacts.md) on your websites may actually represent a single real‑world person. Automatic merging allows you to get rid of duplicates by combining several contacts into a single object.

The system automatically merges contacts that are clearly associated with the same person. This means that the system always merges contacts that are associated with the same email address.

Automatic merging can occur when new contacts are created or when the data of existing contacts is updated. The merging is only triggered by live site actions such as a form submission, contact registration, or email subscription. Creating contacts or editing them via the [administration interface](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/contact-management/working-with-contacts.md) or via the [API](https://docs.kentico.com/13api/on-line-marketing/contacts.md) does not trigger the automatic merging.

After the system merges objects, the result is a single object called a _parent_.

> **Note:** **Automatic merge collisions**
>
> When attribute collisions occur during automatic merges, the system uses the values of the child contact. If a collision is detected between the attributes of child contacts and the parent contact does not contain a value in the given field, the priority of the values is undetermined (the system uses the values of the first contact loaded from the database).