How to find companies using a specific technology with BuiltWith

The usual way is BuiltWith's Lists feature. You search for a technology by name, such as Shopify, Klaviyo, or HubSpot, and BuiltWith shows every website where it has detected that technology. You can narrow the list by country, by how much traffic a site gets, and by when the technology first appeared or was last seen on the site, and then export it as a spreadsheet. Lists are part of BuiltWith's paid plans. If you only want to check one company, BuiltWith's free lookup on its website and its browser extension show the technology a single site uses.

It helps to know how BuiltWith gets its data. It crawls websites and records the code each page loads: the platform the site runs on, the analytics and advertising tags, the chat and form tools, the payment and email scripts. That makes it very good for anything that shows up on a public website. Software that leaves no footprint on the site, such as an internal finance system or most sales tools, generally won't appear, so a BuiltWith search works best for technologies that live on the website itself.

The list is where the real work starts. A search for a popular technology returns more domains than anyone could contact, and many aren't companies you'd sell to. Some are hobby sites or agency test stores. Some are a second domain for a company that's already on the list. Some removed the technology years ago and only remain in the historical results. The export also tells you nothing about whether a company is the right size, in the right market, or already your customer.

A good result is a much shorter list: real companies that run the technology today, that fit your ideal customer profile, that appear once each, and that carry a note saying why they're worth contacting now.

Kite does that work for you. It pulls the list from BuiltWith, removes the noise, checks each company against your profile, and delivers the accounts worth pursuing.

Start by telling Kite in Slack which technology you're looking for and what kind of company you want:

"Find US ecommerce brands on Shopify that use Klaviyo and do at least a few million in revenue."

You can also start from a competitor's product, which is one of the most common reasons to run this search:

"Find companies that run Intercom on their website and look like a fit for us."

Kite is an AI marketer in your Slack. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. From that research, it already knows what you sell, who your best customers are, and who your competitors are. It uses that to propose the rest of the search, such as company size, industry, and location, and you confirm the profile or adjust it before Kite starts.

You'll need to connect your BuiltWith account by adding its API key in Kite, because the searches run through your account and your BuiltWith plan. If you want the finished list in your CRM, a Google Sheet, or Airtable, connect that account too. Otherwise Kite delivers the list in the Slack thread as a table and a file.

Kite starts by turning your request into the exact technology names BuiltWith tracks. BuiltWith often lists several entries for one product, such as a platform and its separate add-ons or tracking scripts, and the one you need depends on what you sell. If you sell a Shopify app, any Shopify store counts. If you sell something that replaces a specific Shopify add-on, only stores running that add-on count. When a name could mean more than one thing, Kite says which entries it chose and why, so you can correct it before the search runs.

You can also combine technologies. A request for stores that run Shopify and Klaviyo but not your competitor's product becomes one list that Kite filters against the others.

Kite retrieves the list of websites using each technology through BuiltWith's Lists API. Each entry includes the domain, the date BuiltWith first detected the technology there, and the date it was last seen, along with the company details BuiltWith has on file, such as the company name and country.

Those two dates do a lot of the work. A recent last-seen date means the site still runs the technology, so Kite keeps those and sets aside sites where it hasn't been seen in months. A recent first-detected date means the company adopted the tool recently, which is often a good moment to reach out, because they're still setting it up. When you're looking for companies that left a competitor, Kite reads the same dates the other way and looks for the tool's recent disappearance.

When you already have accounts in mind, Kite can work in the other direction. It looks up each domain with BuiltWith's domain lookup, which returns the site's current and past technology, and tells you which of your accounts run the tool you asked about. For a long list of accounts, it prepares the domains as a file for BuiltWith's bulk lookup.

Kite groups the domains into companies and drops the ones that aren't real businesses. BuiltWith's redirect lookup shows when one domain forwards to another, so a brand's regional sites and old domains collapse into one company instead of appearing three times. Kite also removes parked domains, agency demo and test stores, and personal sites, using the company details on each entry and a look at the site itself when the details are thin.

Kite checks every remaining company against your ideal customer profile before it adds the company to the list. For companies registered in the US or UK, BuiltWith's financial lookup supplies financial data on the company. Kite fills in the rest from its own built-in sources, such as Apollo and Crustdata, which supply each company's industry, headcount, location, revenue, and funding without any extra account. It drops companies that are too small or too large, in the wrong market, or outside your region.

Next it removes your existing customers and your competitors, using what it learned about your business and, if you've connected one, the accounts already in your CRM.

Kite then reads each company's full technology profile with BuiltWith's domain lookup. That shows whether the company already runs a direct competitor of yours, which tools you'd need to work alongside, and how much of a match the rest of the setup is. A store that runs Shopify, Klaviyo, and a reviews app looks different from a store that runs Shopify alone, and that difference often decides whether it's a good prospect.

Every company that passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason, such as "Shopify and Klaviyo store with about 80 employees, added Klaviyo in the last two months, and runs no competing reviews app." When the list runs past about fifteen companies, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so you know where to start.

If fewer companies qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many it found and why the rest fell short. It can also widen the search for you. BuiltWith's recommendations lookup finds websites with technology profiles similar to your best accounts, and Kite's own research can find companies that resemble the ones you've already chosen.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the Slack thread where you asked. It says which BuiltWith technology names it searched, how many domains came back, how many it removed and why, and how many companies made the final list. The list comes with it as a table and a file. If you asked for the results in your CRM, a Google Sheet, or Airtable, Kite writes them there and tells you what it created.

From there, Kite can find the right people to contact at each company, by title and seniority, with their LinkedIn profile and a professional email address when one is available. It can then draft outreach that mentions the technology the company runs. If you want new adopters as they appear, ask Kite to run the same search every week, and it will post only the companies that started using the technology since the last run.

When Kite finishes, you have a list of real companies that run the technology you asked about and fit the kind of customer you sell to.