Lead Scraping
Lead scraping is the programmatic collection of contact and firmographic data on prospects from public sources, directories, and social platforms.
In plain English
Lead scraping is the "get the list" step before outbound. A scraper visits directories, social platforms, search results, or data APIs and pulls companies and people that match a brief. Output is a table: name, title, company, location, email where available. Modern scrapers combine public sources with commercial enrichment databases to get complete, deliverable records.
It sits in a legal gray zone. Scraping public information is broadly legal, but terms of service, anti-bot mitigations, and region-specific privacy regimes (GDPR, CCPA) all apply. Good practice: respect robots.txt, rate-limit, scrape only public fields, honor opt-outs, and keep the hot path through data vendors with licensed sources where possible.
Why it matters for Black Box
Black Box's Browser specialist can scrape politely and its Research specialist can enrich via licensed vendors. The product ships with conservative defaults — rate limits, vendor-first — and owners can connect their own API keys for stricter control.
Examples
- Pulling a list of Series A SaaS founders in the US from a commercial database.
- Enriching a CSV of company names with domain, size, and role contacts.
- Scraping a public directory for the names of dentists in a target metro.