The short answer
Use a visitor identification tool, or the company visits report in a marketing platform you already pay for. Exclude your own staff, internet providers and bots. Mark the handful of pages that signal buying intent. Then review the list once a week and act on the few companies that matter. Expect a company name for only part of your traffic: vendors report 30% to 65% of visits on mostly US traffic, and less for European and mobile visitors¹.
This guide is the practical companion to our overview of website visitor identification. If you want the mechanics behind the lookup, read how IP-to-company lookup works.
Why your analytics does not show company names
Analytics tools are built to count and describe traffic: sessions, pages, sources and conversions. They do not translate a visitor's IP address into an employer, and in the UK you would not want them to keep raw addresses for that purpose without thinking it through. Seeing companies needs a separate step, a lookup against data that links address ranges to organisations. That is what visitor identification tools, and the company reports inside some marketing platforms, provide.
Step 1: check what you already own
Before buying anything, look at the tools already on your website.
- HubSpot. The Prospects (website visits) tool looks up visitors' IP addresses against HubSpot's own database of company IP addresses and lists the companies it finds, with page views and when they were last seen. HubSpot notes that smaller companies and individuals may appear as their internet service provider, and that visits from mobile networks cannot be identified².
- Marketo. The Company Web Activity report lists the companies visiting your site, with an "Inferred Company or ISP" column that is inferred from the visitor's IP address, and page view counts you can sort by³.
- Your CRM or chat tool. Some CRMs and live chat tools include a basic company lookup. Check the settings before assuming you need a new product.
If one of these is available, start there. A month of data from a tool you already pay for will tell you whether a dedicated product is worth evaluating.
Step 2: understand what the data will look like
It helps to see one lookup by hand. An address's registration can be checked in the regional internet registry: for UK and European addresses that is the RIPE Database, which records the allocations and assignments of address space in the region, usually with the name of the network or organisation that holds each block⁴. Try it with your own office's public address. You will usually find one of three things:
- a block registered to your company (common for large organisations), which any tool can match;
- a block registered to your broadband or business internet provider, which tells a tool nothing unless it has other evidence; or
- an address belonging to a cloud or VPN provider, which tells you nothing about the visitor at all.
Visitor identification vendors add their own proprietary mappings on top of registry data, which is why two tools can name different companies for the same visit². Do this exercise on your own address only: visitors' IP addresses can be personal data (see the privacy section below).
Step 3: choose a tool, if you need one
If your existing tools fall short, trial a dedicated one. Keep the evaluation short and evidence-based:
- Run two vendors side by side for two weeks on the same pages.
- Record the share of visits each one names, and compare it with the figure in their sales material.
- Pick twenty identified companies from each and check they are plausible for your market.
- Ask three colleagues working from home and three from an office to visit, and see who is identified correctly.
- Read the data processing terms before you go live, not after.
The full checklist, including what to ask about UK coverage and pricing units, is in the visitor identification guide.
Step 4: set up filters before you look at the list
An unfiltered list is mostly noise. Set these up on day one:
- Exclude your own company, including every office and your corporate VPN.
- Exclude internet providers. Broadband, mobile and hosting providers are not visitors. Most tools hide them by default; check the filter is on.
- Exclude bots and monitoring services. Uptime checkers, SEO crawlers and security scanners often come from cloud addresses and visit every page.
- Tag known relationships. Mark your agencies, suppliers, investors and existing customers so they are not mistaken for new prospects.
- Exclude careers traffic from sales alerts. A company whose staff read your jobs page is more likely to contain a candidate than a buyer.
Step 5: decide which visits count as a signal
Most identified visits are not a reason to contact anyone. Write down, in advance, which behaviour is worth acting on. A simple rule set for a small team might be:
- High intent: any visit to pricing, a comparison page, an integrations page or the demo request page.
- Building interest: three or more pages, or return visits on two separate days within a week.
- Fit: the company is in a sector and size band you sell to.
Alert someone only when a company is both a fit and shows high intent or building interest. Everything else goes in the weekly review.
An illustrative weekly view
The table below is an invented example to show the shape of a useful report. It is not real data.
| Company | Fit | Pages read this week | Signal | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example Company A | Target sector, 200 staff | Pricing, two service pages, one case study | High intent | Account owner follows up within a day |
| Example Company B | Target sector, 40 staff | Three blog posts on two days | Building interest | Add to a relevant nurture campaign |
| Example Company C | Existing customer | Pricing, contract terms | Account signal | Tell the account manager |
| Example Company D | Not a fit | Careers page | None | No action |
Step 6: route the signal to a person
The value of a visit fades quickly. Research on inbound leads shows the odds of qualifying a lead fall sharply within the first hour; the same logic applies to a company reading your pricing page, as our speed to lead statistics page sets out. Send high-intent alerts to a named owner in the tool they already use, usually the CRM or team chat, not to a dashboard nobody opens. Agree what a good response looks like: a relevant email, a LinkedIn message, a call to an existing contact, or simply noting the interest before a meeting.
Be careful how you use it. Opening an email with "I saw you on our pricing page" tends to feel intrusive. Use the signal to decide who to contact and what to talk about, not as the message itself.
Step 7: review weekly, and feed it back into the website
A 20-minute weekly review keeps the list useful:
- Which target companies visited, and which pages did they read?
- Which alerts were acted on, and what happened?
- Are the filters still right? Remove new noise sources.
- Which pages do target companies read most, and which do they leave from?
The last question is the one most teams skip. The pages that real buying teams read are the pages most worth improving, because every change to them reaches the people you most want to persuade.
Privacy: UK GDPR and PECR in brief
This is a summary of the relevant rules, not legal advice. The ICO lists IP addresses among the online identifiers that can be personal data under the UK GDPR⁵, so company-level identification still involves personal data and needs a lawful basis; many organisations consider legitimate interests. If the tool stores or reads information in the visitor's browser, such as a cookie, PECR also applies; the ICO's final guidance on storage and access technologies, reflecting the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, was published on 29 April 2026⁶. Update your privacy notice to say that you identify visiting organisations, with which provider, and how long you keep the data.
Where Artiweave fits
Artiweave continuously improves the website a B2B company already has, with every change approved by a marketer and measured honestly. Company-level visitor identification is coming to Artiweave, so you will be able to see which companies read the pages being improved. It is not available yet. Artiweave is in private beta.
Frequently asked questions
Can Google Analytics show which companies visit my website?
No. Google Analytics reports visits, pages and traffic sources, but it does not name the organisations behind them. You need a visitor identification tool, or the company visits report in a platform such as HubSpot or Marketo.
Is there a free way to see which companies visit my website?
If you already use HubSpot or Marketo, their company visit reports cost nothing extra to look at. Many dedicated tools also offer a free trial. Checking addresses by hand in the RIPE Database is possible but slow, and visitors' IP addresses can be personal data, so it is not a sensible routine.
Why are so many visitors shown as internet providers?
People working from home, on mobile networks or at small firms connect through addresses registered to their internet provider rather than their employer. Without other evidence, a tool can only name the provider, so most tools hide those visits.
Can I see the names of the people who visited?
Company-level tools name organisations, not people. Some vendors offer person-level identification, but match rates for it are much lower and it brings heavier data protection obligations in the UK.
Sources
- Warmly: Website Visitor Identification Match Rates (March 2026). Vendor's own production data.
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Prospects frequently asked questions (updated December 2025)
- Adobe Experience League: Marketo Company Web Activity report
- RIPE NCC: RIPE Database documentation, FAQ
- ICO: What are identifiers and related factors?
- ICO: Final storage and access technologies guidance published (29 April 2026)
Know which companies read your best pages.
Artiweave continuously improves the website your B2B company already has, with every change approved by you. Company-level visitor identification is coming. It is in private beta.