BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a web-technology intelligence service that identifies software and infrastructure used by websites. Its lookup and trend products organize detected technologies into categories including analytics, advertising, hosting, content management, e-commerce, payment, and development tools.^[1][2]

The service is operated by BuiltWith Pty Ltd, which lists an address in Sydney, Australia. It markets the resulting website-level and historical adoption data for sales prospecting, market analysis, technology research, cyber-risk review, and financial analysis.^[1]

What It Does

BuiltWith allows a user to enter a domain and view technologies detected on that website. It also reverses that relationship by producing lists of sites associated with a selected technology, enabling users to examine adoption patterns or identify organizations using a particular product.^[1]

The wider product set includes technology trends, e-commerce product and keyword lists, rankings of popular sites, lead-generation tools, datasets, browser extensions, CRM integrations, and programmatic access. BuiltWith Ask provides a natural-language query interface, while APIs and MCP tools are offered for software and AI-agent workflows.^[1]

Data and Methodology

The database is based on observable characteristics of websites and records the presence of identifiable technologies. BuiltWith says it covers more than 126,000 internet technologies and updates aggregate usage statistics weekly. Its e-commerce coverage includes platform and product information together with attributes such as industry, location, rank, and company-size estimates.^[1]

The trends interface separates technologies into functional groups and permits country-level and product-level views. The provider advertises historical adoption data, but its public landing pages do not fully disclose crawl frequency for each domain, detection-rule construction, false-positive rates, or procedures for resolving ambiguous implementations.^[2]

Products and Delivery

Individual lookups and public trend pages provide browser-based access. Commercial users can obtain filtered lead lists, bulk datasets, API responses, and integrations with customer-relationship-management systems. The plans page describes tiered access, while dataset and API offerings support users that need results outside the interactive website.^[1][3]

Because detections represent technologies visible in a site's public implementation, they indicate adoption rather than contractual status, expenditure, or active use of every feature. Historical observations can nevertheless show when a detectable tool appeared or disappeared from a website.^[1][2]

Buyers and Use Cases

Sales teams use technology signals to identify prospective customers, while analysts can compare adoption among competitors or track changes in a software category. BuiltWith also promotes its data to investors studying technology diffusion and to security teams reviewing the components present on an organization's public sites.^[1]

An independent Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article documented an academic use of the dataset. Researchers examining 35,262 technology startups used BuiltWith observations to identify when companies installed A/B-testing software, then compared those adoption histories with web-traffic and other performance data. The study illustrates how longitudinal technology detections can function as an alternative research dataset rather than solely as a sales tool.^[4]

Limitations and Context

BuiltWith occupies the web-technology profiling segment, where the primary unit of observation is a domain and its detectable technical stack. Its breadth supports cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, but conclusions about corporate behavior require care because a website can retain inactive code, use technology only on unobserved pages, or conceal server-side services.^[1][2]

The Harvard study combined BuiltWith with SimilarWeb, news, and Crunchbase data rather than treating technology detection as a complete measure of company performance. That design demonstrates a common analytical practice: using BuiltWith as one observable signal and validating business conclusions against independent datasets.^[4]