AI matching helps your team find the best fit between animals and the people who want to adopt or foster them. Instead of manually combing through applicants, you get a ranked list of compatible candidates for any pet — or a ranked list of compatible pets for any applicant — with a score, plain-English explanation, and a quick read on what works and what to watch out for.
What makes it different from a keyword search is that it genuinely understands context. "I work from home and have a big fenced yard" registers as a strong fit for a high-energy dog that needs space — not because the words overlap, but because the AI understands what they mean together. It factors in household setup, lifestyle, experience level, what the applicant is looking for, and what the animal needs to thrive.
The AI is a decision-support tool. Your team always makes the final call.
What staff see
When you open a pet's profile, a Matches tab appears showing adopters and fosters ranked by compatibility. When you open an adopter or foster profile, the same tab shows ranked animals. Every match includes:
- A compatibility score from 0–100%
- Strengths — short labels explaining why the match works (e.g. "Fenced yard", "Works from home", "Dog breed experience", "No children")
- Concerns — short labels for things worth reviewing (e.g. "Apartment living", "First-time pet owner", "Limited space")
- A Show details button that generates a full written explanation of why this pair scored the way it did — specific, not generic
Matches are always presented as suggestions. Nothing is sent, recommended, or acted on automatically.
How it works, end to end
1. Enable AI matching (admin only) at Settings → AI Features. Off by default.
2. Choose which form fields to include. No applicant form fields are shared with the AI unless your team explicitly enables them. See Controlling what the AI sees.
3. Generate profiles. On the AI settings page, click Generate profiles. This reads your current pets and applicants and builds compatibility profiles for each one. For large datasets it can take a few minutes — stay on the page until it finishes. You'll see a count of how many animal and participant profiles were created.
4. Quick estimates appear automatically. Once profiles exist, every eligible pet and applicant profile shows a Matches tab with quick compatibility estimates. These are lightweight comparisons based on overall profile similarity — good for a fast scan.
5. Click "Find Matches" for the full picture. The Find Matches button triggers the AI to individually evaluate the top candidates and return a scored, ranked list with strengths, concerns, and explanations. Results are cached — viewing them again is instant and doesn't re-run the AI.
6. Expand any match for a written explanation. Click Show details on any match card to generate a full written summary. Generated on demand and cached, so it only calls the AI once per match.
7. Keep results fresh. If a pet or applicant's data changes after you last ran Find Matches, a stale badge appears on the Matches tab. Click Find Matches again to get updated results.
Where matches appear
On a pet's profile
The Matches tab shows on every pet's profile when matching is enabled. It has two sub-tabs:
- Adopters — ranked adoption applicants compatible with this pet
- Fosters — ranked foster applicants compatible with this pet
The Fosters tab is only visible to users with foster coordinator access or higher.
On an adopter's profile
The Matches tab shows ranked animals for that applicant. Visible to adoption counselors and above.
On a foster's profile
The Matches tab shows ranked animals for that foster applicant. Visible to foster coordinators and above.
Who and what matching applies to
Animals
Matching only includes pets that are active and available. A pet is automatically excluded if it has been deleted, is no longer available for adoption, or its status is an outcome (adopted, transferred out, deceased, lost, etc.). These exclusions take effect instantly when a status changes.
People
Matching includes adopters and fosters with active or pending status. Inactive, suspended, or blocked applicants are automatically excluded. Volunteers are not included in matching.
What the scores mean
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 85–100% | Strong alignment across multiple factors |
| 70–84% | Compatible on most factors with minor gaps |
| 50–69% | Some compatibility, but real concerns worth reviewing |
| Below 50% | Significant mismatches or insufficient data |
Matches below 40% are filtered out entirely and not shown.
Scores reflect the data that exists — a well-filled-out profile produces a more accurate score than a sparse one. When a profile is missing key information, the system treats that as uncertainty and ranks it lower rather than guessing.
Automatic safety checks
Before scoring anything, the system runs hard checks on each candidate pair. These can disqualify a candidate entirely — no score, not shown in results:
- Species mismatch — An applicant who indicated they only want dogs won't see cats, and vice versa
- Child safety — A pet flagged as not good with children won't appear for households with children
- Household animal conflict — A pet with known aggression toward cats or dogs won't appear for homes that have them
- Foster at capacity — A foster with no remaining capacity won't appear in results
These checks run on the pet's core profile data and on what the AI can determine from the applicant's form answers. If your forms don't ask about household children, the children safety check won't fire — the AI only evaluates what it has.
Controlling what the AI sees
There are two separate layers of control: what your team explicitly chooses to share, and what is automatically protected regardless.
What you choose to share
No custom form fields are sent to the AI by default. Your team opts each field in individually.
To include a field: open any form in Settings → Forms, click the gear icon on a field, and turn on Include in AI matching. If that toggle is off, that field is never used for matching — even if matching is enabled globally.
The AI settings page also has a bulk-enable option: click Review and enable fields to see all eligible fields across your forms and turn them on in one step. Ineligible fields (those containing personal information) are not shown in this list and cannot be enabled.
After updating your fields, click Generate profiles again to rebuild profiles with the new selections.
What is always included
Regardless of field settings, the following pet attributes are always part of matching:
- Species, breed, size, age, sex, spayed/neutered status
- Temperament
- Good with / bad with (children, cats, dogs)
- Health notes and special needs
- Medical complexity (active conditions or prescriptions)
For adopters and fosters, the system also looks at which pets they've linked, favorited, or previously adopted to infer species preference — no form field needed.
What is automatically protected
PII (personally identifiable information) — names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses — never reaches the AI, regardless of your field settings. Three layers of protection run server-side:
- Field type blocking — Email, phone, address, and file upload fields are excluded at the source and cannot be enabled for matching.
- Identity column blocking — Any field that syncs to a core identity column (name, email, phone, address) is blocked regardless of label or type.
- Content scanning — All free-text answers are scanned for PII patterns before being sent. If an applicant typed their phone number into an open-ended question, it's caught and replaced with
[redacted].
The AI never knows who a specific applicant is — only compatibility-relevant information about their lifestyle, household, and preferences.
Availability by region
AI matching is not available for organizations in the EU/EEA, United Kingdom, or Switzerland due to data protection regulations (EU GDPR, UK GDPR, and Swiss FADP respectively) that place specific requirements on AI-based automated processing of personal data.
If your account's country is set to one of these regions, the AI matching toggle will be visible but disabled with an explanation. If you believe your region was set incorrectly, contact support.
Other AI features (AI descriptions and AI data mapping) are not affected by this restriction.
Privacy and data handling
- Processed by OpenAI. Matching uses OpenAI's API. Data is sent to OpenAI's servers as part of this.
- Not used to train AI models. Per OpenAI's Data Processing Agreement, data submitted through the API is never used for training and is not retained after the request completes.
- You decide what's shared. No form field data is sent unless your team explicitly enables it field by field.
- No automated decisions. Matching produces suggestions your team reviews. No emails are sent and nothing happens without a staff action.
- Data can be cleared anytime. Admins can delete all matching profiles and results instantly from the AI settings page.