When you validate an email in Laravel, you have the ability to specify whether you want a specific model to be excluded. The reason why you would exclude a model is for example, if you have a user account and the user needs to update their first name, but their email stays the same. Typically, Laravel would re-save the whole form and also validate the email, but because that user is already using the email, it will spit back a “unique” validation error mentioning the email already exists in the system (even though it is still being used by said user.