Where European B2B data actually comes from

Every outbound campaign rests on data someone had to source. Knowing where it came from is not bureaucracy, it is what makes the campaign defensible.

Public business registries

The base layer across most European markets: company existence, registration details, sector and often size. Highly reliable for firmographics, useless for finding the right person. Good for building the universe of companies, not the contact list.

Company websites

Published contacts, team pages, role descriptions. Accurate when current, and genuinely public, but coverage varies enormously by company size. Small companies often publish everything, large ones publish almost nothing.

LinkedIn

The best source for matching a real person to a real role, which registries cannot do. Roles are current and public. It does not give you an email address, which is where the next step comes in.

Specialist databases

Useful for filtering at scale and for firmographic enrichment across several markets at once.

Quality varies widely, and the important question is where the provider sourced it. A database that cannot explain its own provenance is a liability you are renting.

Inference, and why it needs checking

Many tools infer addresses from a name and a domain pattern rather than confirming them. That is a legitimate technique, but the output is a guess, which is exactly why verification is not optional.

The compliance question

In Europe you should be able to say where a contact came from and why you have a legitimate reason to write to them about their professional role. Public, business-related sources make that straightforward.

Large bought lists of unclear origin make it impossible, which is the practical reason to avoid them, quite apart from their poor accuracy. See the GDPR guide.

Combining sources beats any single one

In practice the workable approach is layered: registries for the company universe, LinkedIn for the person, websites and tools for the address, verification before sending. No single source does all four well.