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Describe what a company does, in your own words. The match runs against each company’s own description, so you find businesses by actual activity rather than by an industry label somebody picked from a dropdown years ago.
Works on both surfaces — Contact Search to find people at those companies, Company Search to get the companies themselves.

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Why not just use industry?

Industry taxonomies are too coarse for most go-to-market work. Financial Services contains a retail bank, a crypto exchange, a mortgage broker, and an insurance claims processor. If you sell to one of those, the label is nearly useless as a filter. Description search separates them, because it reads what the business says about itself:
We recommend against filtering on industry columns for targeting. Their values carry both false positives and false negatives at a rate that will quietly distort your results. Describe the business instead.

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Control how close a match must be

Two ways to do it. Pick one — sending both match and maxDistance is a 422.

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Option 1 — a named preset

Send match with one of four names. Each is a similarity floor calibrated for company descriptions specifically. On target is the measured share of matches at that stop that genuinely fit. Presets are cumulative — broad returns everything related would, plus a looser band beneath it.

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Option 2 — your own similarity threshold

Send maxDistance instead and put the floor wherever you like:
A 55% similarity floor is "maxDistance": 0.45. A raw maxDistance means exactly what it says and skips our calibration. To find your own number, preview with "includeScores": true and read _companySimilarity on each row — they come back best-match first. Scroll to where results stop being useful and set your floor just above that.

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If you send neither

You get similar — a 50% similarity floor. Sending nothing is exactly the same search as sending "match": "similar", down to the same rows.
Short queries widen exact automatically. A one- or two-word query (“airlines”, “staffing agencies”) embeds with a lower ceiling than a descriptive phrase, so exact would starve — 6 of 8 major airlines sat below its normal floor. On queries of two words or fewer, exact runs at a 55% floor instead of 60%. This applies to the preset only; a raw maxDistance always means exactly what it says.
Company descriptions vary enormously in length and style, which is why these floors sit far lower than the job title ones. Do not carry a number across from another target — 50% here is a solid match; 50% on a job title is noise. Accuracy falls off sharply past similar. At broad, roughly three in four results need review. Use related and broad to discover companies you hadn’t thought of, then tighten before you build a list.

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Write a good description

The phrasing matters more here than on the other two targets. A phrase describing what the business makes, who it sells to, and how it operates works well. A company name, a product brand, or a single abstract noun works poorly. Better:
Weaker, but handled:
Short queries are compensated for automatically. A one- or two-word category noun embeds with a lower ceiling than a descriptive phrase, so exact widens to keep its promise. You still get better results from the fuller phrase, so write one when you can.

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Examples

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Combine several descriptions

Up to three company-description nodes per filter. Join them with OR to cover a market that doesn’t reduce to one sentence — the piece no keyword tool can do:
See SmartSearch for combining this with job titles and look-alikes.

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Next steps