What it reads, and what it leaves alone
The finder loads the home page you give it, then follows that site's own links to pages that usually carry an address: contact, about, team, press, booking. Five of those at most. If the home page links none, it tries /contact and /about.
On each page it picks up addresses the way a person would if they read the source: mailto: links, addresses in the text, the ones Cloudflare hides behind a script, and the anna [at] studio [dot] com kind people write to dodge spam bots.
It doesn't follow links to other sites, doesn't log in to anything, doesn't look at LinkedIn or social profiles, and doesn't build an address from a name and a pattern. If the business didn't write it down, it isn't in the results.
Reads
- ✓Home, contact, about and team pages
- ✓mailto links and plain-text addresses
- ✓Cloudflare-protected addresses
- ✓"name [at] domain [dot] com"
Never
- ✕Guessed patterns like first.last@
- ✕Bought or shared lead lists
- ✕Social profiles and LinkedIn
- ✕Pages behind a login
Which address to write to
Most small business sites publish two or three addresses, and they aren't equal. The finder sorts them into four kinds, best first:
- A person. anna@, raj.patel@, or a Gmail address the owner uses for the business. If your email is about something they run, this is the one.
- A shared inbox. info@, hello@, bookings@. At a business with fewer than ten people the owner usually reads it. Write as if they do.
- Someone else's. The agency that built the site, a booking platform's relay address, a partner. Writing there reaches the wrong person, and it's an easy way to look careless.
- No-reply. noreply@, support tickets, donotreply@. Nobody reads these. Skip them.
One thing the finder doesn't do: ask the mail server whether the inbox still exists. Sites keep old addresses for years after someone leaves. If you're about to send more than a handful, check first. A bounce rate above a few percent is how a domain ends up in the spam folder, and it's slow to climb back out.
From one website to a list of people who'd buy
Looking up one site is useful when you already know who you want to write to. Most of the time you don't. You know the kind of business that buys from you, and you have a free Saturday and a browser.
That Saturday is the part ScoutKite takes over. You paste the website of a customer you already have. It looks for more businesses like them, reads each site the same way this tool does, keeps an address only when it's on their page and their mail server confirms the inbox is real, and writes a short first email built on one thing it read there. You read every draft before it goes, and it goes from your own inbox, about 25 a day.