Plain HTTP Crawler Automates Contact Info Extraction from Company Websites

A developer has built an open-source tool called website-lead-extractor that automates the process of harvesting contact information from company websites, a task that traditionally consumes hours of manual work. Given a starting URL, the crawler uses Crawlee's CheerioCrawler to navigate within the same domain up to a chosen depth, extracting emails, phone numbers, and social media profile links from raw HTML. Because it relies on plain HTTP requests rather than a headless browser, it is fast and inexpensive to run but cannot retrieve content that loads dynamically via JavaScript. This makes it well-suited for static or server-rendered sites, which represent the majority of small and mid-sized business websites, though heavily client-rendered pages may yield incomplete results. The tool is available as an open-source project on GitHub and also as a hosted Apify actor requiring no local setup.