How to use website technology lookup tools in 2026
A lookup answers one of two questions, and the two need different tools.
1. Work out which of the two questions you have
One question is: what does this one named site run. The other is: which sites run this one named tool, and how many.
Installmap answers the second, as a share of a named list of companies crawled as a set. For the first question, on one arbitrary domain, a per-site profiler is the right tool.
2. For one named tool, open its page here
The tools index carries 275 tools. Its page gives the count, the share and the base. The group pages give the same tool per list, so the answer reads as 4,885 crawled Inc 5000 sites, not as a number with no base.
3. Read what the detection actually saw
A detection is a match on the page: a script host, a generator meta tag, a response header, a cookie name or an asset path. The group crawls load each homepage in a headless browser, so scripts a tag manager injects after load are counted; the wider sample uses a plain fetch.
Detection on a homepage misses anything a company runs on a page further in, or behind a login. A zero means the tool was not detected on that homepage. It does not mean the company has no licence for it.
4. For one arbitrary site, use a per-site profiler
Installmap does not publish per-company rows, so it cannot answer what one named company runs. Read from each provider's own pages on 3 September 2026: BuiltWith states individual site lookups are free forever. Wappalyzer states a free tier of 50 lookups and email verifications a month. PublicWWW searches source code and states that unregistered search covers the top 1,000,000 sites.
The ranked list puts eleven side by side, ordered by how much each shows without payment.
5. Cite the base the number divides by
A lookup result on its own is not a number anyone can check. What makes it citable is the base it divides by and the date it was collected, both of which sit in the Cite this card on every page here, alongside the 4 September 2026 crawl date and a link to the method.
Where a lookup and a share disagree
Two providers can report a different result for the same site on the same day: one loaded the page in a browser and the other did not, or one fetch was blocked. The group crawls record which companies returned no record at all, and that count is on the method page next to the denominator.