Hey everyone, welcome to Argus. If you've ever built a prospecting list — a hundred companies, a thousand companies — you already know the real work isn't finding the websites. It's turning that list into something you can actually email or message. That step is where most tools, and most people, quietly waste hours.

The Argus team recently read through 3,415 company websites, collected between August and September 2026, and recorded exactly what each one published. Not a random web sample — these were real lists real users pasted in while prospecting, which makes the numbers a much more honest picture of what a working list actually looks like.

Here's the first number worth sitting with: 70.3% of sites that responded published an email address somewhere. The other 29.7% published nothing at all, usually just a contact form. That means on a list of a thousand companies, roughly three hundred were never going to hand you an address, no matter which tool you used or how carefully you looked.

The second finding is the one that actually explains why so many "email extractor" results come back thin. Only 64.6% of published addresses were sitting on the homepage. The remaining 35.4% were on a contact page, an about page, sometimes buried in a privacy policy. Most free tools only read the exact URL you give them. On this sample, that approach alone would've missed more than a third of the addresses that were genuinely there to find — not hidden, just not on the homepage.

There's also a distinction worth making that most tools blur completely: a dead website and a blocked visit are not the same thing. 9.2% of domains in this data never resolved at all — the business was gone. A separate 7.7% resolved fine but blocked the automated visit. That second group might publish a perfectly good contact; nobody was just allowed to read it. Lumping those together is how a healthy company ends up mislabeled as a dead end.

And when businesses do publish an email, 39% of the time it's a department address — info@, sales@, support@ — not a named person. info@ alone showed up 495 times, more than double the next most common. 71.7% of sites publish exactly one address total, not the scattered handful people tend to assume.

The finding that surprised the team most, though, was this: 37.2% of the sites that published an email also published a WhatsApp number. For a lot of Western-built tools, WhatsApp isn't even something they check for. On lists like these, it's not a fallback — for more than a third of businesses, it's sitting right next to the email as an equal channel.

That gap is basically why Argus exists. It's a bulk email extractor that checks the homepage and the contact page on every company website you give it, returns what it actually finds as clean emails and click-to-chat WhatsApp links, and only uses a credit when something real comes back. Nothing charged for a website that has nothing to give.