How do you find a company’s tech stack? Three ways: inspect the site by hand, run a single-site technology checker, or enrich a whole domain list at once. One site takes minutes. Five hundred sites is a different job, and it’s the one this guide actually solves.
I’m going to be honest with you. I once pitched a Shopify integration to 500 companies without checking what they ran. About 200 of them weren’t on Shopify. Two people replied just to tell me that. I’ll share the full damage in a minute.
Let’s get into it.
📌 TL;DR: To find a company's tech stack: (1) check by hand (view the page source, watch DevTools, read their engineering job posts); (2) use a single-site checker for one-off lookups; (3) for a list, run a bulk tech stack lookup in your spreadsheet: input column of domains or names, output column of technologies, row range like 2-500, one run. Then filter the column to find companies by the technology they use.
What Counts as a Company’s Tech Stack?
A company’s tech stack is the set of tools and platforms it runs its website and business on. In practice, that breaks into a few buckets:
- CMS or e-commerce platform (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow)
- Analytics and tag managers (GA4, tag containers)
- Marketing automation and CRM tools
- Payments and checkout
- Hosting, CDN, and infrastructure
- Frontend frameworks and libraries
When you collect this stack information across many companies, it gets a name: technographic data, firmographics’ nerdy sibling. It answers a question no industry label can: what does this company actually RUN? Two logistics firms can share an industry code and live in different software universes.
And the reason stacks are worth tracking is concentration. W3Techs measures WordPress at roughly 41% of ALL websites: platform choices cluster so hard that one tech column can segment half your market on its own.
🔍 Did You Know? Per W3Techs, WordPress alone runs about 41% of all websites, and the top handful of e-commerce platforms cover most online stores. Detect one platform field and you've segmented nearly half the web.
So how do you actually see what a company runs? Free ways first.
How Do You Check a Website’s Technology by Hand?
View the page source, watch the network tab, and read the company’s job posts. Free, surprisingly revealing, and nobody can rate-limit you. Here’s each move:
View-Source Clues
Right-click any page, view source, and read the fingerprints. A generator meta tag that says “WordPress”. Asset paths like /wp-content/ (WordPress again) or cdn.shopify.com (guess). Script names that mention known tools. Thirty seconds per site once you know the tells, and the tells are everywhere.
DevTools
Open Chrome DevTools and watch the Network tab while a page loads. Every analytics beacon, tag manager, and CDN announces itself in the request list. It takes practice to read, and it’s strictly one site at a time. But it sees things the page source hides.
HTTP Headers
One level nerdier, and worth knowing: servers sometimes introduce themselves in their response headers. Fields like X-Powered-By can name the framework or platform outright, and the Server header hints at the hosting layer. You can read them in DevTools’ Network tab: click any request, open Headers. Many companies strip these for security, so treat a header as a gift, not a guarantee.
Job Posts and Case Studies
Here’s the underrated one: engineering job ads list the REAL stack, including the server-side tech no external scanner can see. Search the company’s careers page or “site:linkedin.com/jobs [company] engineer” and read the requirements: “Python, Postgres, AWS” is a tech stack confession in public. Vendor case studies work the same way: “How [Company] scaled with [Tool]” names names. Slow? Yes. But it’s the only free route to the backend.
Single-Site Checker Tools
There’s a whole category of technology-lookup sites and browser extensions that fingerprint a URL on demand: paste a domain, get a detected-tech list. They’re genuinely useful for one-off checks, and most offer free tiers with paid bulk plans. The honest ceiling: your list. Checking 500 domains one paste at a time is a week of your life. If you’re comparing the tools in that category, I’ve done a tested comparison of the alternatives in this folder.
Which brings us to the list problem. Here’s how I handle it now.
How Do You Run a Bulk Tech Stack Lookup?
You enrich a domain or company-name column with a tech-stack service, right inside your spreadsheet. Do the math first: hand-checking runs 3-5 minutes per domain. Times 500, that’s a lost week. A bulk tech stack lookup does the same 500 in one run. Step by step:
- Install the add-on. Grab the CUFinder add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace. Google’s add-ons help page shows where it appears after install.
- Copy your API key. Head to your CUFinder dashboard and copy the API key from there.
- Enter the key in the add-on. Paste it once and you’re connected.
- Pick the service. Open the add-on from the Google Sheets menu. It opens as a right panel listing all the enrichment services. For this job, pick the Company Tech Stack Finder: input is a company name or domain, output is the list of technologies the company uses.
- Map columns, set the range, run. Set the input column (domains or names), the output column (where the tech list lands), and the row range (rows 2-500, say, to skip the header and cover the list). Then run it.
Honest expectations, because detection has physics. External detection sees client-side and DNS-visible technology: the CMS, analytics, CDN layer. Server-side internals often stay invisible (that’s what the job-post method is for). And unmatched rows come back empty rather than guessed, which is exactly what you want feeding decisions.
Input hygiene helps here too. Two minutes before you run: dedupe the domain column, strip “https://” and paths down to bare domains, and drop rows you’ve already checked this quarter. Clean inputs are the cheapest match-rate upgrade there is: the lookup can only fingerprint what it can resolve.
💡 Pro Tip: Run rows 2-6 as a test batch first, and add a "checked on" date column next to the tech column. Stacks change more often than you think: a snapshot without a date turns into folklore within a quarter.
A Worked Example: 5 Rows, Before and After
Say your sheet looks like this, with domains in column A and an empty column B waiting for the stack:
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Domain | Tech Stack |
| 2 | hansellogistics.com | |
| 3 | bluepinesoftware.com | |
| 4 | corvidanalytics.com | |
| 5 | marlowandsons.com | |
| 6 | tidewaterrobotics.com |
Then I ran the add-on: Company Tech Stack Finder, input column A, output column B, rows 2 to 6. A minute later, the same sheet looked like this:
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Domain | Tech Stack |
| 2 | hansellogistics.com | WordPress, HubSpot, Cloudflare |
| 3 | bluepinesoftware.com | React, Segment, AWS |
| 4 | corvidanalytics.com | Webflow, GA4, Stripe |
| 5 | marlowandsons.com | Shopify, Klaviyo |
| 6 | tidewaterrobotics.com | WordPress, Marketo, Fastly |
Happy with the test? Change the range to rows 2-500 and run the real list.
Notice the output format: several tools in one cell, comma-separated. That’s deliberate: one company runs many things, and a substring search finds any of them. Keep the cell intact rather than splitting it into twenty columns; you’ll filter it in a second with one formula.
→ 500 domains → one run over coffee → a tech column → a filter away from your best-fit segment.
Only have company names, no domains? Fix that first: the find company websites in Google Sheets guide fills the domain column, and domains match more precisely than names here.
How Do You Find Companies by the Technology They Use?
Flip the lookup: instead of asking “what does this company run?”, filter a list by a technology. Two routes, depending on whose list you’re searching.
Route 1: your own sheet. Once the tech column is filled, one FILTER formula pulls every company running a given tool:
→ =FILTER(A2:A500,ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“Shopify”,B2:B500)))
That’s the formula that saved my 2025 campaign. After the disaster send, I enriched the same 500 domains, filtered to the 312 that actually ran Shopify, and re-sent to them alone. Reply rate roughly tripled. Same offer. Right audience.
Route 2: database-side discovery. When you need companies you DON’T have yet (every Klaviyo store in Germany, say), you query a technographic database rather than your own sheet. That’s how the technographic data providers work, and it’s the net-new-list counterpart to enriching what you already own. The output of that query lands right back in a sheet, where Route 1 takes over.
Why bother either way? Because tech choices are buying signals. A company on your competitor’s tool is a displacement target. A company on your integration partner’s platform is a warm fit. And a company mid-migration is a timing gift. I’ve written more on how teams use this in B2B technographic data.
📌 Example: My 2025 integration pitch: 500 domains, no platform check, ~40% not on Shopify, replies under 1% (two of them just corrections). The re-run: tech column enriched, FILTER to 312 Shopify stores, same email. Replies roughly tripled. The offer was never the problem.
What Mistakes Should You Avoid When Checking Tech Stacks?
The big ones: homepage-only checks, stale snapshots, and reading too much into a detection. The full scar map:
- Checking only the homepage. The marketing site might run Webflow while the product runs React on AWS. Check the app subdomain too, or trust the job posts for backend truth.
- Treating a snapshot as permanent. Companies re-platform constantly. Date-stamp the column and re-run before any campaign that depends on it.
- Confusing an agency’s tools with the company’s choices. That tag manager might belong to their agency. One tool is a hint; a pattern is a signal.
- Assuming detection is complete. Client-side tech shows; server-side often doesn’t. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
- Leaping from “has the tool” to “wants mine”. A detected CRM is not intent data: it tells you fit, not timing. Match the signal to your ideal customer profile before anyone hits send.
- Pitching platform-specific offers without filtering. My 2025 story. Two minutes of filtering beats two hundred wasted sends.
FAQ: Finding a Company’s Tech Stack
How do you find a company’s tech stack for free?
View the page source, watch DevTools while the site loads, and read the company’s engineering job posts. Free single-site checkers cover the rest. Free scales badly, but it works.
How do you check a tech stack quickly?
One domain: paste it into any technology checker, ten seconds. A whole list: run a tech-stack enrichment on the column and let the sheet fill while you do something better.
What is technographic data?
Technographic data is information about the technologies companies use: their CMS, analytics, CRM, infrastructure. Sales teams use it to segment and time outreach; the technographic data in Google Sheets guide goes deeper.
What are firmographic and technographic data?
Firmographic data describes what a company IS: industry, size, revenue, location. Technographic data describes what it RUNS. Together they answer “who fits” and “who fits our integration story.”
Can you see what backend or database a website uses?
Usually not from the outside: server-side tech doesn’t announce itself to browsers. Job posts, engineering blogs, and conference talks are the realistic routes to backend truth.
Are website technology checkers accurate?
Good on client-side tech (CMS, analytics, CDNs) and blind to most server-side tools. Treat detections as high-confidence hints, confirm before betting a campaign on one, and re-check periodically.
Why do sales teams care what technology a company uses?
Because the stack reveals fit and timing: competitor tools flag displacement targets, partner platforms flag integration fits, and migrations flag open buying windows. It’s segmentation by evidence instead of guesswork.
It’s Time to Fill That Tech Stack Column
You’ve got all three moves now. Hand checks for the accounts that really matter. A checker for the one-off “what do they run?” moments. And a bulk tech stack lookup for every list past 30 rows: mapped, ranged, date-stamped, filterable.
Picture your next platform-specific campaign: the list already filtered to companies that actually run the platform, the FILTER formula doing in two seconds what cost me 200 wasted sends. That’s my workflow now. My reply rate forgave me eventually.
And the tech column plays best with friends: pair it with industry and size from the company enrichment pillar and you’ve got real segments. The whole data enrichment in Google Sheets hub maps every other column after that. Tell me in the comments: what’s the most surprising tool you’ve ever found in a prospect’s stack?
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