Getting started
Your first search
How to describe the companies you want so Breaknorm finds them.
Breaknorm describes every company from its own website — what it sells, who it sells to, what kind of business it is — not from the industry code it picked when it registered. That changes how you should ask.
Describe the business, in plain words
Write the sentence you would say to a colleague.
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| “NACE 28.13” | “companies that manufacture industrial pumps” |
| “SaaS” | “companies selling subscription software to warehouses” |
| “logistics” | “third-party warehousing and fulfilment providers” |
| “agencies” | “agencies that run Shopify stores for other brands” |
Two things you can say separately, and should when they matter:
- What they offer — “make packaging machinery”, “install solar on commercial roofs”.
- Who they sell to — “sell to hospitals”, “serve e-commerce brands”. Your agent passes this as
sells_to, and it is often the sharper of the two.
Then narrow with filters
Filters apply on top of the description: country, city/region, company type (manufacturer,
wholesale, service, webshop, …), headcount band, revenue band, business model, technology used
on the site, and flags such as has a phone number or has a LinkedIn page. Ask your agent to
list_filters if you want to see them all.
Within one filter the values are alternatives (DE or AT); different filters must all hold (in DE or AT,
and 11–50 people).
Require exact words from their website
Descriptions catch meaning; some things are a word. A certification (ATEX, IATF 16949), a product code, a technology, a niche term — ask for it on the company’s own pages:
Pump manufacturers in Germany whose website mentions ATEX.
Your agent passes site_text: { all: ["ATEX"] }. It searches every page we crawled from each company —
home, about, services, references, careers, legal pages too — and keeps only companies whose pages say
it. any keeps companies that mention at least one of several words, none drops those that mention
any of them, and a phrase in double quotes ("centrifugal pump") must appear word for word. It works as
a filter everywhere: in counts, lookalikes, segments and exports as well.
It is fastest with a country filter (a fraction of a second); a quoted phrase across every country can take a few seconds.
Search inside your own list
“Of the 5,000 companies I exported last week, which ones make packaging machinery?” — put them on a list
and search within it (within_lists). The same works with your CRM accounts or a lookalike seed
list: every result comes from the list.
Count before you pull
Ask for the count first. It is the honest total, not the page size, and it can be broken down by country, type or size in the same call.
- A few hundred — a workable list. Look at the top 20, then export.
- Tens of thousands — that is a market, not a list. Narrow it, or ask for a segmentation into groups.
- Zero — usually the wording rather than the coverage. See a search returns nothing.
Make it better as you go
Tell the agent which results are right and which are not (“more like jako.at, not like the webshops”).
It passes those as like / not_like and the ranking moves towards what you meant. Companies you never
want to see again belong on an exclusion list.
A search returns up to 100 companies. The complete list — every company above the match threshold, not just the top 100 — is an export.