What a Lead Contains, Exporting & Avoiding Duplicates

Every lead Leadscraper delivers is more than a company name with a phone number. Behind it is a research process: Leadscraper first plans a search strategy, then searches the open web plus German industry directories and association registers, loads each company website, and finally evaluates each individual result against your search. What ends up in your list as a lead is the result of that chain.

This article shows you three things: what a lead contains, how to export accepted leads as CSV or XLSX, and how Leadscraper prevents duplicates — and how you can help.

What a Lead Contains

A lead bundles three layers: the company, the contact persons, and Leadscraper's evaluation. Every piece of information comes from a traceable source (legal notice, commercial register, about page, news, etc.) — Leadscraper remembers for each field where the value came from and how confident it is.

Company Level

• Company name and, where publicly available, legal form, commercial register number, and year of founding
• Industry / sector — the classification Leadscraper has determined for the company (including whether it's, for example, an agency or a reseller rather than the operating provider)
• Location: street, postcode, city, region
• Company size: employee estimate as a range
• Company contact details: central email address and phone number
• Web data: website and, where available, social media profiles
• German verification signals: whether a legal notice was verified, master craftsman status, guild membership, ISO certifications

Contact Person Level

Multiple contact persons can be stored per lead. For each person, Leadscraper captures — as far as publicly available:

• Name and role (e.g., CEO, owner, purchasing)
• Email and, if available, phone and LinkedIn/Xing
• a reachability classification: is this a directly verified decision-maker with their own email, a decision-maker reachable via the main line, or a backup contact? This classification influences the evaluation (see below).

If Leadscraper identifies a consistent email pattern on a company website (e.g., firstname.lastname@company.com, derived from several real addresses), it can derive a probable address for a contact person from it on export. Such addresses are clearly marked as "inferred" with a percentage — never issued as a verified address.

Evaluation Level

This is the part a purchased list doesn't have. Each lead includes:

• The reasoning — a short paragraph explaining why this lead matches your search. This is the assessment Leadscraper makes per lead.
• An uncertainty note for leads that probably match but aren't 100% confirmed. You'll recognize these in the results by a yellow warning badge. You receive them so you can decide yourself — with an honest note explaining why there's still some doubt.
• An acquisition plan for many leads: company overview, opportunities, risks, a recommended channel mix, and a ready-to-use message draft you can copy directly.

Each search delivers up to 10 leads. They're the ones that remain after evaluation — not the first 10 results. Ten that fit beats a hundred you have to click through yourself.

Related article: How to Find the Right Leads (Formulating Your Search Correctly) — if you want to get the maximum out of every run.

Rating Leads: The Basis for Export and Learning

Before you export, you rate. In the results view, you mark each lead as "Accepted" or "Rejected". For "Rejected", you choose a reason — that's the most important lever for training Leadscraper on your target audience.

The available reasons:

Why this matters: from 10 ratings, Leadscraper starts recognizing patterns from your feedback and uses them in the next search. Accuracy grows in stages — a realistic progression:

• Cold Start (under 10 ratings): around 60–70% accuracy. Leadscraper is still working broadly.
• From 25 ratings: calibrated, typically 85–90%.
• From 50 ratings: mature, over 90% — your patterns act almost like fixed rules in the reasoning.

That's why it pays to start broadly and rate consistently, rather than searching extremely narrowly from the beginning. You're training your target audience into existence.

Related article: How to Train Leadscraper on Your Target Audience — more on ratings, patterns, and accuracy.

Exporting Leads

What Gets Exported

You export exactly the leads you've marked as "Accepted". That's intentional: the export is your curated list, not the raw inventory. This way, nothing unchecked ends up in your CRM.

How to Do It

1. Open the lead list for your profile.
2. Set the filter at the top to "Accepted". The export button always refers to this filtered view.
3. Click Export and choose the format.

The button shows you directly how many leads will be exported (e.g., "Export 14 Leads"). If the filter isn't set to "Accepted" yet, Leadscraper prompts you to switch there first — so you only pull your confirmed leads.

Formats

There are two formats:

• CSV — universal, opens in any spreadsheet tool and can be imported anywhere. The file is UTF-8 encoded so that special characters appear correctly in Excel.
• XLSX (Excel) — ready-formatted Excel file with appropriate column widths.

The Columns

Both formats contain the same columns — deliberately kept lean so every column is reliably filled and matches exactly what you see in the list:

If a lead has multiple contacts, you get one row per person — the company data repeats, the contact part varies. This lets you use the list directly for personalized outreach.

The "Email Source" column is your trust indicator for the address: direct means the address was found as-is; inferred (85%) means it was assembled from the recognized email pattern of the company — with the stated reliability.

Full Data Export (GDPR)

In addition to the lead export, there's a full data export in Account Settings. That gives you a JSON file of everything stored under your account — your leads, your search runs, your ratings, and more. This is the export for access and portability requests under GDPR, not for everyday work with leads.

Avoiding Duplicates

Nobody wants to contact the same company twice. Leadscraper prevents duplicates automatically on multiple levels — and you can additionally feed it your existing customers so they don't appear in the first place.

What Leadscraper Does Automatically

• No duplicates within a profile. Leadscraper remembers per search profile which companies it has already delivered — by domain. Within the same profile, you won't get the same company a second time, even across multiple runs.
• No duplicates within a run. Even if the same company appears through multiple sources in one run, it's delivered only once.
• Branches & parent companies. If Leadscraper identifies through the commercial register that multiple locations belong to the same parent company (e.g., chain stores), they are merged rather than shown individually.
• Person duplicates. Contact information is also normalized — variant spellings of umlauts and title additions like "Dipl.-Ing." don't cause the same person to appear twice.

What You Can Do Yourself

Leadscraper doesn't initially know your existing customers — but you can give them to it in two ways:

1. Upload existing customers once (recommended). In your account settings, there's an Existing Customers List. Add the domains (or full URLs) of your existing customers and leads there — one per line or separated by commas/spaces, up to 10,000 entries. Leadscraper normalizes them automatically (protocol, www, and paths are stripped). These companies are then automatically skipped in all your searches — they don't appear in results at all and don't cost any credits. The easiest way is to export the domains of your customers from your CRM and paste them here; a change takes effect immediately for the next run.

2. Flag individual stragglers. If a known company slips through, mark the delivered lead as "Rejected → Already Know Them". This removes it from your export list — and this marking doesn't distort your accuracy rate (it counts as neutral, not as a genuine "rejected").

The Same Company in Multiple Profiles

Important to understand: domain deduplication works per profile. If you run two different search profiles (e.g., "organic bakeries Bavaria" and "food trade Munich"), the same company can appear in both, provided it matches both searches. That's intentional — in each profile, it's a standalone, relevant result. If you don't want that in one of the profiles, mark it there as "Already Know Them".

Frequently Asked Questions

How many leads do I get per search?
Leadscraper delivers up to 10 evaluated leads per search. They're the ones that remain after research and evaluation — quality over quantity. If you want more, start additional runs or refine the search.

What happens to leads I've rejected — are they gone?
No. Rejected leads remain visible in your list (filter "Rejected") and serve as a learning signal. They just don't go into the export.

Can I also export unchecked leads?
The export is designed for evaluated "Accepted" leads — that keeps your outreach list clean. Quickly go through the leads and mark what fits; then you have a curated file in one step.

Why does it say "inferred" on some emails?
When no personal address was directly findable, but the company's email pattern is clearly recognizable, Leadscraper derives a probable address. The percentage tells you how reliable the pattern is. Directly found addresses carry direct.

How do I prevent reaching out to existing customers?
Best to upload the domains of your existing customers once in account settings under Existing Customers List — those companies will then be automatically excluded from all searches, without any credit cost. Flag individual stragglers additionally with "Already Know Them".

Which countries does Leadscraper cover?
The focus is on the DACH region: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — with particular depth for German chambers, associations, and certifications.

Related articles: How to Find the Right Leads · Automating Recurring Searches · Connecting Leadscraper to Your CRM

Updated on: 15/06/2026