Company Research Actor

Apify Actor for researching a public company website and returning structured website evidence in one JSON result.

This Actor is built for company research, lead enrichment, and downstream automation. It can start from a direct website, a bare domain, or only a company name.

What This Actor Does

• accepts website_url, domain, or company_name
• discovers an official website when only the company name is provided
• prefers Apify's Google Search Results Scraper for company-name discovery and uses the first valid Google organic website result directly
• falls back to the internal heuristic search flow only when the nested Google search actor is unavailable or returns no usable website result
• if discovery still stays ambiguous after fallback, returns candidate_websites instead of guessing
• crawls a small set of high-value pages such as homepage, about, products/services, and contact
• uses a hybrid crawl strategy:
  • http-first when HTML is enough
  • browser-fallback when the site is JS-heavy or the HTTP probe is not enough
• fails fast on heavy block signals such as CAPTCHA, WAF, or explicit access denial instead of spending time on low-value salvage attempts
• when running on Apify, prepares a standby Apify Proxy profile and can auto-escalate to proxy for suspicious blocked hosts even if use_proxy is left off
• extracts:
  • company name
  • resolved website and domain
  • LinkedIn company URL when found
  • cleaned text from kept pages
  • public emails, phones, and an address candidate
  • rule-based summary, products, and market signals
• returns crawl metadata including strategy, mode, confidence, failure_reason, timing breakdown, browser engine, and salvage usage

Best Fit

Works best for:

• company websites
• manufacturer and industrial sites
• B2B corporate sites
• one-page company sites
• public product/catalog websites with clear navigation

Less reliable for:

• login-only sites
• CAPTCHA or anti-bot protected sites
• sites with very heavy client-side rendering
• sites where key information is hidden behind forms, PDFs, or gated downloads

Input

Resolution order:

1. website_url
2. domain
3. discovery from company_name

Main input fields:

• company_name: company name for website discovery or as a hint for extraction
• website_url: full website URL, highest priority input
• domain: bare domain, normalized to https://<domain>/
• social_link: known company social URL, usually LinkedIn
• country: optional discovery hint
• country: optional discovery hint, available as a dropdown in the Apify input UI
• mode: fast or deep
• anti_block_mode: browser hardening level, off, basic, or aggressive
• use_proxy: force Apify Proxy from the start for HTTP and browser crawling
• proxy_groups: optional Apify Proxy groups such as RESIDENTIAL
• salvage_if_blocked: try likely subpages if the homepage is blocked or unavailable, except for clearly heavy-blocked sites that are failed fast
• max_pages: max number of kept pages in output
• max_text_chars: max total extracted text characters across kept pages
• discover_if_missing: whether to discover a website when only the company name is given
• extract_contacts: whether to extract emails, phones, and address
• follow_subpages: whether to crawl internal pages beyond the first page
• include_path_hints: preferred path fragments used to prioritize internal links

Mode

fast

• lower latency
• stops earlier once enough useful content is found
• good for lead enrichment and bulk runs

deep

• broader page coverage
• better for contacts, products, and company profile quality
• slower than fast

Anti-Block Mode

off

• no browser hardening beyond the default crawler setup

basic

• adds browser environment hardening and lightweight blocker dismissal
• recommended default for most runs

aggressive

• adds stronger popup/overlay removal and lightweight resource blocking
• useful for difficult websites, but slightly riskier on fragile sites

Example Inputs

Direct website:

{
  "website_url": "https://vnsteel.vn/",
  "mode": "fast",
  "max_pages": 3,
  "max_text_chars": 7000,
  "extract_contacts": true,
  "follow_subpages": true
}

Bare domain:

{
  "domain": "pny.com",
  "mode": "deep",
  "max_pages": 3,
  "max_text_chars": 8000,
  "extract_contacts": true,
  "follow_subpages": true
}

Company name only:

{
  "company_name": "VNSTEEL",
  "country": "Vietnam",
  "mode": "deep",
  "max_pages": 3,
  "max_text_chars": 7000,
  "discover_if_missing": true,
  "extract_contacts": true,
  "follow_subpages": true
}

Company name discovery notes:

• when only company_name is provided, this Actor first tries to call apify/google-search-scraper
• if Google returns a usable organic website result, the Actor uses that website directly for crawling
• the nested search run is executed under the current runner account, so the runner pays for that search usage
• if the nested search run is unavailable or returns no usable website result, the Actor falls back to its internal discovery heuristic
• if discovery is ambiguous, the Actor returns candidate_websites and stops instead of crawling the wrong website

Custom path hints:

{
  "website_url": "https://eup.vn/",
  "mode": "deep",
  "max_pages": 4,
  "max_text_chars": 10000,
  "extract_contacts": true,
  "follow_subpages": true,
  "include_path_hints": [
    "about",
    "products",
    "services",
    "contact",
    "gioi-thieu",
    "linh-vuc",
    "lien-he"
  ]
}

Output

The Actor writes one result object to:

• the default dataset
• the OUTPUT record in the default key-value store

Output Shape

{
  "company_name": "PNY Technologies Inc.",
  "resolved_website_url": "https://www.pny.com/",
  "resolved_domain": "pny.com",
  "resolved_social_link": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/pny-technologies/",
  "candidate_websites": [],
  "sources": [
    "https://www.pny.com/",
    "https://www.pny.com/professional/support/contact-us"
  ],
  "pages": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.pny.com/",
      "title": "PNY | NVIDIA Graphics, Storage, Networking & Memory Solutions",
      "page_type": "homepage",
      "text": "PNY delivers solutions in over 50 countries...",
      "text_chars": 3200
    }
  ],
  "contacts": {
    "emails": ["gopny@pny.com", "tsupport@pny.com"],
    "phones": ["19735159700"],
    "address": "100 Jefferson Road, Parsippany, New Jersey 07054 US"
  },
  "signals": {
    "about_summary": "PNY delivers solutions in over 50 countries...",
    "products": ["GeForce graphics cards", "Solid state drives", "PC memory"],
    "markets": ["Global"]
  },
  "metadata": {
    "discovery_used": false,
    "strategy": "http-first",
    "mode": "deep",
    "anti_block_mode": "basic",
    "browser_used": false,
    "browser_engine": null,
    "salvage_used": false,
    "pages_crawled": 3,
    "failure_reason": null,
    "confidence": {
      "website": 0.99,
      "contacts": 0.99,
      "summary": 0.85,
      "products": 0.63,
      "overall": 0.92
    },
    "timings": {
      "total_ms": 5472,
      "discovery_ms": 0,
      "crawl_ms": 5472,
      "http_probe_ms": 5472,
      "browser_crawl_ms": 0
    },
    "duration_ms": 5472
  }
}