The Rise of Website Reveal: Why Every B2B Tool Is Suddenly Doing It (and Why They’re Not All the Same)

Over the past year, it feels like every B2B tool — from sales platforms to CRMs to ABM vendors — has started offering website reveal.

If you’ve logged into LinkedIn, HubSpot, or your favorite intent data platform lately, you’ve probably seen some version of:

See which companies are visiting your site!”

It’s the new “must-have” checkbox in every B2B product demo. But the truth is: not all website reveal is created equal.

Let’s talk about where this wave came from, how the technology actually works, and why some vendors show you who visited while others stop at which company did.

Phase 1: Reverse IP Lookups and Their Limits

The earliest form of website reveal was reverse IP lookup — a simple but limited trick.

Large companies like IBM or Cisco purchase their own IP address blocks. That means if a visitor comes from one of those IPs, you can infer “someone from IBM was on our site.”

But here’s the problem:

• Only a small fraction of companies own IP blocks.
• IPs change constantly for everyone else (especially remote or cloud workers).
• And it never tells you who visited — just the corporate network they came from.

So while reverse IP was clever, it was noisy, incomplete, and unreliable in a world where remote work, VPNs, and dynamic IPs are the norm.

Phase 2: The Pixel Era

The next generation of website reveal leaned on a new idea: identity stitching via pixels, cookies, and device fingerprints.

Here’s how it works:

1. A data provider installs pixels across thousands of websites.
2. When someone fills out a form (say, downloads an ebook) on any of those sites, the pixel captures their email, IP, and device fingerprint.
3. Later, when that same browser visits your site, the provider matches the fingerprint or cookie — and can tell you who it is, even if they didn’t fill out a form this time.

This opened up the possibility of recognizing known visitors across domains — not just by company, but by the specific browser or device.

Still, most vendors stayed at the company level to avoid privacy gray areas. That changed with the next phase.

Phase 3: Contact-Level Reveal

The next leap came with contact-level reveal — the ability to not just identify the company visiting your site, but the specific person behind the visit.

This was pioneered by Adam Robinson, founder of Retention.com. After building a large consumer identity network in the U.S., he realized he was sitting on a B2B gold mine.

Unlike Europe, the U.S. had (and still has) far looser privacy regulation — especially around cookies and consent. Robinson spotted the gap and moved fast, launching RB2B.com, the first major product to offer contact-level website reveal at scale.

RB2B combined device fingerprinting, cookie stitching, and form-fill identity graphs to match anonymous site visits to actual professionals — often by name, title, and company. It isn’t perfect, but it worked well enough to light a fire across the entire B2B ecosystem.

Within months, many data and ABM platforms started following suit, adding some flavor of “contact reveal” to their roadmap.

Why Everyone’s Suddenly Doing It

Three big shifts explain the explosion in website reveal products in 2024–2025:

1. Signal Loss Elsewhere:
   With cookies crumbling and paid media signals shrinking, marketers are desperate for reliable ways to connect anonymous activity to real people. Reveal data fills that gap.
   
   
2. Data Co-ops and Aggregation:
   The barrier to entry dropped. Providers like LiveIntent, People Data Labs, and 5x5 now sell or license these identity graphs, making it easier for SaaS companies to plug them in and repackage the capability.
   
   
3. The ABM Gold Rush:
   Every B2B go-to-market team wants better visibility into who’s “in-market.” Reveal makes intent tangible. Whether you’re Demandbase, 6Sense, or a scrappy startup, showing “who’s on your site” has become table stakes.
   

Contact-Level vs. Company-Level: The Great Divide

Some platforms only show you company-level data (e.g., “someone from Shopify visited”). Others go further and reveal individual contacts (e.g., “John Doe, Growth Manager at Shopify”).

The reason isn’t technical — it’s legal and ethical.

• Europe (GDPR) treats contact-level identification without explicit consent as a privacy violation.
• The U.S. is still more permissive — as long as users can opt out, companies can operate in that gray zone.

So tools like HubSpot, 6sense, and Demandbase stop at the company level. They have to maintain strict GDPR compliance globally.

Meanwhile, newer entrants like Vector, Warmly, and Primer can show contact-level data for U.S. visitors only — taking advantage of the U.S.’s “opt-out” standard.

As a result, you’ll often hear phrases like “U.S.-only contact reveal” or “company-level globally, contact-level in the U.S.” That’s not a product limitation — it’s a privacy line.

The Data Layer: Everyone’s a Waterfall

You might hear vendors claim they “use 300+ data providers” or have a “unique waterfall” approach.

Here’s the truth: everyone’s a waterfall.

Most tools rely on the same underlying data co-ops and enrichment partners — Xverum, MixRank, People Data Labs, PredictLeads, CoreSignal, and others. The real difference is in how they merge, deduplicate, and refresh that data to maximize match rates without compromising accuracy.

So if you see someone bragging about a “proprietary reveal dataset,” take it with a grain of salt.

Where Website Reveal Is Headed

The next wave isn’t just “who visited” — it’s “what they did after.”

The most useful reveal systems will tie website activity into a full-funnel view:

• Which companies and people are moving from anonymous → known → opportunity → customer.
• Which ad campaigns or audiences are driving those visits.
• And how that activity translates into pipeline and revenue.

That’s the direction Primer is heading with its upcoming Overview — a unified funnel that connects website visits, CRM data, and ad performance into one place.

The Bottom Line

Website reveal isn’t new — but it’s finally usable.

The tech evolved from reverse IP lookups to multi-layered fingerprinting and cookie stitching, and then to contact-level identification. Privacy laws shaped who can show contact-level vs. company-level, and data co-ops made it possible for every SaaS tool to bolt it on.

The question for marketers now isn’t whether to use website reveal — it’s which kind they can trust to actually improve sales performance, not just vanity metrics.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about seeing who visited. It’s about turning anonymous engagement into meaningful action — intelligently, compliantly, and at scale.