Frequently asked questions
How the data is sourced and verified, what arrives when you buy, and how pricing, updates and refunds work. Anything specific to one city or industry lives on that list’s own page — including its live preview, its email coverage, and the date its records were last refreshed.
Where does the data come from?
Every record starts from a public business listing — the same information a business publishes about itself: name, category, street address, phone, website, Google rating and review count. We then crawl each business's own website to find a real contact email address rather than guessing one or pointing you at a contact form. Nothing is bought from a third-party data broker, and nothing is scraped from behind a login.
How is this different from scraping Google Maps myself?
Two things. First, the email addresses: a Maps scrape gives you a website URL, not a mailbox, and the gap between those two is most of the work — we visit the site, find the address, and record whether it is a corporate domain address or a webmail one so you can prioritise. Second, the cleaning: results are de-duplicated across overlapping searches, permanently-closed businesses are dropped, and records whose location cannot be resolved are discarded rather than filed under a guess. A raw scrape of a single city will also silently cap out at roughly 16 results per query, which is why hand-rolled exports of a large city are usually far shorter than the market really is.
How fresh is the data, and does it get updated?
Each list shows the date its underlying records were last refreshed, and that date is per-scope rather than a site-wide banner — a city page tells you when that city's businesses were last touched. Buy once and you keep lifetime access: the download link rebuilds the file live, so re-downloading later gives you the current version of the same scope at no extra cost. When a scope is substantially re-collected we email buyers of that scope.
Are the email addresses verified?
Addresses are SMTP-checked before delivery, and anything that fails is excluded rather than shipped with a warning label. Each row records the email type so you can treat them differently: a corporate domain address (yourname@thebusiness.com) is generally a better outreach target than a webmail one (gmail, hotmail, yahoo), and a role address (info@, contact@, hello@) behaves differently again. Every list page shows its email coverage up front — how many of the businesses in that scope actually have an address — so you know before you buy rather than after.
What exactly is in the download?
A row per business with: name, phone, full street address, postal code, website URL, parent domain, Google rating, review count, email address where one was found, and the email type. Available as CSV, XLSX or JSON — the same data in all three, so pick whatever your CRM or outreach tool ingests most easily. Every list page shows a five-row live preview from the actual file before you buy.
How is a list priced, and are there bundles?
Pricing scales with scope: a single city costs less than a whole state or province, and a whole country is the widest bundle. The country bundle is cheaper than buying its states individually, and each state is cheaper than buying its cities individually, so if you are going to need more than a couple of adjacent scopes the bundle is usually the better purchase. Each page links to the wider scopes it belongs to.
What is the refund policy?
If the data quality does not match what the preview showed you, email support@publicleads.com within 7 days for a full refund — no questions asked. The preview is drawn live from the same file you will receive, specifically so that expectation and delivery cannot drift apart.
Why is a list I want marked "coming soon"?
We do not sell a file too thin to be useful. If a scope holds fewer businesses than the minimum we consider worth paying for, the page shows a waitlist instead of a buy button. Leave your email on that page and you will hear the moment it is ready — which is also a useful signal to us about which scopes to collect next.
Can I use these lists for cold email outreach?
These are publicly-listed business contacts, not an opt-in email list. Buying a list is not a compliance guarantee and nothing here is legal advice — you are responsible for evaluating CAN-SPAM, CASL, the Australian Spam Act or whatever else applies to your own campaign, and for talking to a lawyer if you are unsure. Our Compliance & Responsible Use page sets out the specific obligations that apply to every message you send: identifying yourself accurately, a truthful subject line, a valid physical mailing address, and a working unsubscribe you honour promptly.
Is a business's information removed on request?
Yes. A business that does not want to appear can ask to be removed and we take it out of future files — see the Remove My Business page. Because delivered files are already in a buyer's hands we cannot retract those, which is one reason the data is limited to business contact information that the business itself publishes.
Still stuck? Email support@publicleads.com — or read Compliance & Responsible Use for the outreach rules in full.