---
title: How to research a company from its domain or email with Context.dev
description: Context.dev turns a company's website domain, or the domain in a work email address, into a structured company profile, and an AI marketer can use that profile to qualify the account by checking what the company sells, how big it is, how it sells, and whether it fits your customer profile.
slug: /how-to/research-a-company-from-its-domain-or-email-with-context-dev
page_type: playbook
lead_prompt: How do I research a company from its domain or email address with Context.dev?
target_prompts:
  - How can I use an AI marketing agent to research a company from its domain or email with Context.dev?
entity: Kite
category: AI marketing agent
author: Devon Wells and Kite
date_published: '2026-10-17'
date_modified: '2026-10-17'
related_use_cases:
  - /use-cases/build-b2b-lead-lists.md
  - /use-cases/inbound-lead-response.md
  - /use-cases/competitor-analysis.md
integrations:
  - name: Context.dev
    page: /integrations/context-dev.md
---

# Playbook

# How to research a company from its domain or email with Context.dev

[Add Kite to Slack](/signup) · [See how Kite works](/product-marketing)

---

## Key Takeaways

- A company's website domain is enough to research it, and a work email address carries that domain after the @ sign. Context.dev reads the company's website and returns a structured profile: its name, description, industry, employee range, location, social accounts, and links to its pricing, careers, and signup pages.
- Context.dev on its own is an API for developers. You send it a domain and get back data, but deciding whether the company is worth your time is still your job.
- Kite uses Context.dev's profile, product catalog, and site pages to answer the questions that qualify an account: what the company sells, who it sells to, how big it is, and how it sells.
- Kite scores each account from one to five against your customer profile, drops your existing customers and competitors, and explains its reasoning with a source for each fact.
- You end up with a short account brief for each company, posted where you asked and saved to your CRM when one is connected.

## How do I research a company from its domain or email address with Context.dev?

You research a company with Context.dev by sending its website domain to Context.dev's brand lookup, which reads the company's site and returns a structured profile of the business. If all you have is a work email address, the part after the @ sign is the company's domain, so [jane@acme.com](mailto:jane@acme.com) tells you to look up acme.com. Context.dev can also take a work email directly. It refuses addresses at free or disposable email providers, because a gmail.com address tells you nothing about where someone works.

The profile Context.dev returns covers the basics of who the company is:

- The company's name, a short description of what it does, and its slogan
- Its industry and subindustry
- Its employee range and, for public companies, its stock ticker
- Its address, public contact email, and phone number
- Its social media accounts
- Links to its blog, careers, contact, pricing, login, and signup pages
- Its logos and brand colors

Context.dev does more than the brand lookup. It can build a catalog of the products a company sells from its website, list every page in its sitemap, turn any page into clean text, classify the company with standard industry codes, and search for news about it. Working with Context.dev directly means getting an API key, using credits from a free or paid plan, and writing requests against those endpoints, then reading the data that comes back.

That data describes a company, but it doesn't qualify one. Qualifying an account means deciding whether it's worth pursuing, and that depends on your business. A 40-person software company with a self-serve signup page is a great fit for one seller and useless to another. Someone still has to compare the profile against your customer profile, check whether the company is already a customer or a competitor, and write down why it fits.

A good result is a short brief you can act on: what the company does, how big it is, how it sells, whether it fits, and the evidence behind each point. Kite does that work for you. It runs the Context.dev lookups, reads the pages that matter, and turns what it finds into a qualification decision with its reasons attached.

## How to get started

Start by giving Kite the domain or email address and saying what you want to know. You can ask about one company:

> "Research the company behind [priya@northlane.io](mailto:priya@northlane.io) and tell me if they're worth a call."

Or you can hand over a batch:

> "Here are 30 email addresses from last week's webinar. Research each company and tell me which ones fit our customer profile."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. By the time you ask, it already knows your customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors from its research on your business, so it knows what makes an account worth pursuing without a long brief from you.

Context.dev is built into Kite, so you don't need a Context.dev account, an API key, or credits. To have Kite save its findings to your CRM, connect your CRM account through OAuth. If your list is in a spreadsheet or a CSV file, share it in the conversation.

Researching companies is routine work, so Kite does it and then tells you what it found. Updating records in your CRM works the same way. Kite asks before it sends any outreach to the people on your list.

## How Kite researches a company from its domain or email

### Which company does this domain or email belong to?

Kite first works out which company it's looking at, because a wrong match spoils everything that follows. For an email address, it takes the domain after the @ sign. When that domain belongs to a free email provider such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo, the address doesn't identify a company, so Kite says so and looks for another clue, such as the company name the person typed into a form.

Kite also trims the domain down to the company's main address before the lookup. A subdomain like app.northlane.io or mail.northlane.io points to the same business as northlane.io, and Context.dev's profile is keyed to the main domain.

### What does the company do, and how big is it?

Kite reads Context.dev's brand profile to establish the company's basic facts. The description and slogan say what it does in its own words. The industry, employee range, and address tell Kite the company's market, size, and location, which are usually the first three things a customer profile filters on. A stock ticker marks a public company.

Context.dev keeps a cached copy of each profile for up to three months. When something suggests the company has changed recently, such as a new name or a relaunched website, Kite can ask Context.dev to read the site again instead of using the stored copy.

### What does it sell, and how does it sell it?

Kite uses Context.dev's product catalog and the page links in the profile to learn how the company makes money, because that's often what decides fit. The product catalog lists the products found on the company's website, with a name, a description, a link, and a price where one is shown.

The links in the profile tell Kite a lot on their own:

- A signup or login link means the company runs a product that customers sign in to, and often sells it self-serve.
- A pricing link lets Kite read the company's plans and price points. Kite turns that page into text through Context.dev and reads it directly, because prices are the detail that summaries most often miss.
- A careers link points to open roles, and a company hiring for a team you sell to is often about to buy.
- A blog link shows whether the company publishes and what it writes about.

Kite can also crawl the company's sitemap to see what kinds of pages it has. A site with sections for integrations, customer stories, or industries tells you how mature its marketing is and who it's trying to reach.

### Is anything happening at the company right now?

Kite searches Context.dev's company news for recent events, because a timely reason to get in touch makes an account more valuable. A funding round, a product launch, a new office, or a new executive can each give your team something specific to say. When the brief needs more detail on funding or hiring, Kite adds what its other built-in sources, Crustdata and PredictLeads, have on the company.

### Does this account fit your customer profile?

Kite compares everything it found against your customer profile and gives the account a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason. A reason might read: "Self-serve analytics product, 50 to 200 employees, based in Austin, hiring two marketing roles." Kite checks the company against your existing customers and your competitors before it scores, and it drops any match with the reason stated.

Kite keeps facts and judgment apart in its brief. Each fact it reports, such as the employee range or the price of a plan, comes with the page or source it came from. Each conclusion it draws, such as "probably sells to mid-market teams," is labeled as its own inference.

### What happens when Context.dev has no data?

Kite falls back to its other research tools when Context.dev can't build a profile, so a missing profile doesn't end the research. Some sites block automated readers, and some very new or very small companies have nothing for Context.dev to index. In those cases, Kite opens the site itself, reads the pages directly, and searches the web for the company. If it still can't confirm what the company does, it says so in the brief rather than guessing.

### What Kite reports back

When the research is done, Kite posts its findings in the conversation where you asked. For one company, you get a short brief. For a batch, you get a table of every account with its fit score and reason, followed by a list of the companies Kite skipped and why. Kite also saves what it learned to your team's knowledge base, so later work on the same account starts from what it already knows.

With your CRM connected, Kite writes the company's details into the company record, including the industry, employee count, location, website, and description, and adds a note with the fit score, the reason, and the sources. From there, Kite can find the right people to contact at each strong account, draft a personalized email for each one, or prepare a call brief for the salesperson who owns it.

## What the finished work contains

When Kite finishes, you have a clear answer about each company and the evidence behind it, in a form your team can use right away.

- **The company profile.** Each account has its name, what it does, its industry, employee range, location, social accounts, and links to its pricing, careers, and signup pages.
- **What it sells.** Each brief lists the company's main products and, where the site shows them, its plans and prices.
- **The fit score and reason.** Each account gets a score from one to five and a sentence explaining it, with existing customers and competitors removed.
- **Recent events.** When there's news worth mentioning, the brief includes the event, its date, and its source.
- **Sources.** Every fact links to the page or source it came from, and every inference is labeled as one.
- **Your CRM record.** With a CRM connected, each company record carries the updated details and a note with the score, reason, and sources.

## Common questions

### How can I tell if an email address belongs to a company?

Look at the domain after the @ sign: if it's the company's own website address, the email belongs to that company, and if it's a free provider such as gmail.com, it's a personal address. You can confirm a company domain by visiting the website it names. Kite does this check first on every address you give it, because a personal address can't be researched by its domain.

### How do I find a company's contact email address from its domain?

Context.dev's brand profile includes the public contact email and phone number a company lists on its website, along with a link to its contact page. That's the general address for the company, not a specific person's inbox. When you need the work email of a particular person, Kite finds it through its built-in Apollo connection and marks whether the address is verified.

### How do I find out which email provider a domain uses?

You can find a domain's email provider by looking up its MX records, the public settings that tell other mail servers where to deliver the domain's email, with any free DNS lookup tool. The records usually name the provider, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. This tells you how the company handles email, which is useful for deliverability, but it says little about whether the company is a good fit for you.

### Can Kite research every new signup or form submission automatically?

Yes. Ask Kite to research each new lead as it comes in, and your form or signup system can start the job by calling a webhook, a web address Kite gives you that signals each new lead. Kite then runs the same research on the email's domain, scores the account, records the lead in your connected CRM, and tells your team about the ones worth following up.

## Related pages

- **Use case:** [Build qualified B2B lead lists](/use-cases/build-b2b-lead-lists.md)
- **Use case:** [Respond to and qualify inbound leads](/use-cases/inbound-lead-response.md)
- **Use case:** Prepare for sales calls with account research (coming soon)
- **Use case:** Run account-based marketing campaigns (coming soon)
- **Use case:** [Run an in-depth competitor analysis](/use-cases/competitor-analysis.md)
- **Use case:** Write partnership outreach emails (coming soon)
- **Integration:** Context.dev + Kite (coming soon)