the surprising truth about finding email addresses online

we scraped around 200 tech blogs and publications recently. not for content, but for something more basic: publicly listed email addresses. we were trying to understand how accessible people actually are, especially in tech and ai circles.

the goal was simple. find a verifiable, public-facing email address on the site. not a contact form, not a javascript-rendered thing you have to interact with. a plain text email sitting in the HTML.

here’s what we found.

only about 8% of the sites we looked at had one. that’s 16 out of roughly 200. it’s a low number, but the breakdown is where it gets interesting.

personal blogs win

the clear winners were personal blogs, especially those with a dedicated /about or /contact page. these weren’t massive sites. they were individuals writing about technology, machine learning, or their own projects. they often had their email right there in the open.

it makes sense. when you’re building a personal brand or just sharing thoughts, you want to be reachable. you’re not hiding behind a corporate layer. you’re just a person.

big publications hide

on the other end, major tech publications and ai-focused news sites almost never had a plain text email address. they relied entirely on contact forms. sometimes those forms went to a general tips line, sometimes to a specific editor. but you couldn’t just copy and paste an address from the page.

this isn’t a criticism. it’s a practical reality. big sites get a lot of noise. forms help them filter. but it does mean that the path to a human is less direct.

substacks were a special case. many use javascript to render email addresses, which means a simple HTML scrape won’t find them. you have to actually load the page like a browser would. it’s a small barrier, but it’s there. it keeps the email out of the raw HTML, probably to avoid the worst of the spam scrapers.

the ratio that matters

when we compared personal blogs to major publications, the personal blogs outperformed 5 to 1 in terms of having a public, scrapable email. five times. that’s not a small difference.

if you’re an indie founder or someone trying to reach out for feedback, collaboration, or just to share something cool, this data suggests a strategy.

prioritize finding and reaching out to individuals with personal blogs. look for that /about page. they’re far more likely to have an email address you can use directly. you’re not sending a message into a black hole of a contact form. you’re writing to a person.

it’s a reminder that the most human corners of the internet are often the most accessible. the ones that feel small, that are built by one person, tend to leave the door open.

i should note a limitation here. this was a small sample. 200 sites. and we were only looking for emails in the HTML. we didn’t try to execute javascript or interact with pages. so this is a snapshot of what’s available without any extra work.

but the pattern feels real. the indie web is built on connection. the big platforms are built on scale. and that shows up in who you can actually email.

maybe it’s time to go find those personal blogs again.

you can find people to connect with on /companions.