Searchbase for marketing agencies: client lead lists and competitor ads in one prompt

Quick answer: Agencies use Searchbase for two jobs: building the new-business list for a city or a niche, and showing a client what their competitors are actually running on Meta, Google and TikTok right now. Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell. A city-wide agency list or a competitor ad sweep takes minutes and costs a few hundred credits on a plan that starts free with 150 credits a month.

What marketing agency teams ask for

These are the shapes of prompt that work. Write them the way you would brief a junior researcher, in plain words, with the filters you actually care about.

• "Every digital marketing agency in Milan with a website, a generic contact email and the client industries they list on their site."
• "Companies advertising kitchen furniture on Meta in Spain right now, with the ad copy and the landing page each ad points to."
• "SaaS companies in Berlin that posted a job for a performance marketer in the last sixty days, with the hiring manager's name if it is public."
• "Restaurants and bistros in Lyon with an Instagram account above 5,000 followers, their handle, follower count and whether they also run TikTok."
• "E-commerce brands in the Netherlands running Google Ads for sustainable clothing, with their contact page and the categories they sell."
• "Every agency listed in the main Amsterdam startup directories, with the founder name, the LinkedIn company page and the services they advertise."

Two things make these prompts work: they name a place, and they name the columns you want back. Vague briefs produce vague tables here exactly as they do with a human researcher.

What comes back

The answer is a table that fills in while you watch, not a document. For agency prospecting the columns usually settle into something like this: company name, website, city, size band, generic email, contact page URL, primary social handle, follower count, and whichever qualifying column you asked for, such as client industries or the services listed on the site.

For a competitor ad sweep the table looks different: advertiser name, platform, ad creative or copy, landing page URL, date first seen, and the country the ad is served in.

Every cell carries a chip with the link to the page the value came from, a freshness badge saying when it was collected, and the extraction method. That matters most in agency work, because the person who receives the list is often a client who will ask where a number came from. You click the cell and show them. When a value cannot be verified from a public page, the cell stays n/a. It is never guessed, so an empty column is information rather than a defect.

Sources that matter for marketing agencies

Searchbase reads any public web page, plus twelve social platforms, three ad libraries (Meta, Google and TikTok), nine job boards, business directories and press coverage. For agencies the weighting is unusual compared with other sectors.

The three ad libraries carry more weight here than anywhere else. They are what lets you answer "who is spending on this category in Italy this month" and "what is our client's competitor testing" without a subscription to a separate ad-spy product. Today teams use Foreplay for saving competitor creative; the difference is that here the ad library sits in the same table as the company data, so the advertiser row already has the website, the email and the social handle next to the ad.

Company pages and directories carry the prospecting work: the agency's own site is where the services, the client logos and the contact email live. Job boards are the best available proxy for budget and intent, because a company hiring a paid-social specialist in Berlin is a company that has decided to spend. Social platforms matter when the target is a creator, a restaurant, a local brand or anyone whose real presence is an Instagram or TikTok account rather than a corporate website. Press fills in funding and expansion signals.

A worked example

Take the prompt: "Every digital marketing agency in Milan with a website, a generic contact email and the client industries they list on their site."

The agent plans first. It decides it needs a directory sweep plus a search pass, then a page read per candidate to pull the email and the client list. You see the plan before it runs.

It then searches, collects a candidate set of agencies, and starts reading. Each page read costs about 1 credit. A social profile costs about 3. If you had asked for a written market overview instead of a table, a Deep Research report would cost 20 to 40.

For a city the size of Milan, a sweep like this typically lands in the low hundreds of pages read, so the whole run sits comfortably inside a Starter month and well inside a Pro one. Rows stream into the table as they are extracted, so you can stop early once you have enough, and you are not billed for the pages the agent never had to read.

What comes out is a spreadsheet you can hand to a salesperson: names, sites, emails, cities, and the client-industry column that tells them which of your case studies to lead with.

From the table to the first message

Once the table exists, the agent can draft outreach for the people in it. It writes multichannel sequences, email and LinkedIn, using what is actually in the row: the industries the agency serves, the ads their competitor is running, the role they just posted.

The review step is mandatory. Searchbase drafts, it does not send. Every message sits in front of you for editing and approval, and launching from the campaign wizard is still being switched on progressively, so today the reliable path is to review the drafts and export them into the sending tool your agency already runs. Nothing leaves without a human deciding it should.

Pricing for an agency team

Free gives you 150 credits a month with no card and JSON export. That is enough to run one real city sweep and see whether the columns come back the way you need them.

Starter, €29 a month, gives 1,000 credits and CSV export. This is the plan for a small agency that builds one or two lists a month and does the occasional competitor ad check for a pitch.

Pro, €79 a month, gives 4,000 credits, API access and credit rollover. This is the usual fit for an agency running new business continuously, because the API lets you push rows straight into your CRM instead of moving CSVs by hand, and rollover means a quiet month is not wasted.

Business, €199 a month, gives 12,000 credits and webhooks. Take it when you are running ad monitoring for several clients on a schedule and want new rows pushed to you rather than pulled.

Prices are in euros, billed annually, by a European company.

Frequently asked questions

Can I build a list of every agency in a city? Yes, and it is one of the most common prompts. Name the city and the columns you want. Coverage depends on what those agencies publish publicly, so a firm with no website and no directory listing will not appear.

Can I see the ads a competitor is running? Yes, across the Meta, Google and TikTok ad libraries, with the creative, the landing page and the date first seen. Today teams use a separate ad-spy tool for this; here it lands in the same table as the company data.

Does Searchbase send the outreach emails? No. The agent drafts email and LinkedIn sequences for the people it found and you review every message. Sending from the campaign wizard is still rolling out, so the current workflow is review and export.

How many credits does a client research project cost? Roughly 1 credit per page read and 3 per social profile, so most single-city lists sit in the low hundreds. A Deep Research report costs 20 to 40 on its own.

Can I white-label the output for a client? The output is a table you export as JSON, CSV, over the API or via webhooks depending on your plan, so it goes into whatever deck or sheet you present in. The source links travel with it, which is usually the point.

Why are some cells empty? Because the value was not verifiable from a public source. An n/a is a deliberate answer, not a gap the agent was too lazy to fill.

Prices checked on 2026-09-08 on searchbase.org.