docs: Add section explaining duplicate person profiles#15396
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docs: Add section explaining duplicate person profiles#15396
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Explain that a single real-world user can have multiple person profiles in PostHog (e.g., from different devices before being identified), and link to the identify docs for merging profiles.
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luke-belton
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Mar 3, 2026
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| ## Duplicate person profiles | ||
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| If your [`identify`](/docs/product-analytics/identify) implementation has gaps, a single real-world user can end up with multiple person profiles. For example, if a user visits your app on a phone and a laptop but `identify` is only called on one device, each device creates its own profile with a separate anonymous distinct ID. This usually points to a misconfiguration — when `identify` is called correctly on every device and session, PostHog merges these into one profile automatically. |
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I'd suggest tying this back to ingestion warnings - this is the most common cause of multiple person profiles I see. e.g. where you use different distinct_ids in your own system to identify users and you've not used alias correctly, meaning we block the merge
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great shout; added
gustavohstrassburger
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Mar 3, 2026
Add context about the most common cause of duplicate profiles — using different distinct IDs without alias — and link to the ingestion warnings page where "Refused to merge an already identified user" surfaces this issue. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
natalia-amorim
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* docs: Add section explaining duplicate person profiles Explain that a single real-world user can have multiple person profiles in PostHog (e.g., from different devices before being identified), and link to the identify docs for merging profiles. * docs: Reframe duplicate profiles as misconfiguration signal * docs: Link duplicate profiles to ingestion warnings Add context about the most common cause of duplicate profiles — using different distinct IDs without alias — and link to the ingestion warnings page where "Refused to merge an already identified user" surfaces this issue. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com> --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Adds a new section to the People/Persons documentation explaining that a single real-world user can have multiple person profiles in PostHog. This happens when someone uses different devices or browsers before being identified, creating separate anonymous distinct IDs.
The section covers:
Checklist
vercel.json