Will Backstory identify the organizations evaluating you?Enterprise security teams evaluate you for months from behind a corporate firewall. Here is exactly how much of that we see.
The honest answer: yes for enterprise security buyers, who browse from corporate networks. Thin for home broadband and mobile. And when a network can’t be resolved to one organization, Backstory tells you instead of guessing.
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first-party · organization-level · no PII to identify
GA4 shows you sessions. It never shows you the enterprise security team that read your docs, compared you, and priced you—then left without a word.
Your best-fit buyers research anonymously, from corporate networks. When inbound dips, you have no second source of warm enterprise pipeline. That’s the gap Backstory closes.
Not another intent database
Third-party tools infer intent from across the web and sell you person-level data. Backstory reads what organizations did on your own site.
| Dimension | Backstory | Third-party intent tools |
|---|---|---|
| Signal source | First-party — what organizations did on your own site | Third-party intent from across the web |
| Resolution | Organization-level identification (no PII) | Person-level tracking across the web |
| The score | Explainable — the signals sum to the number | Black-box propensity |
| Privacy | Cookieless; no PII to identify the organization | Cookies + personal data |
| Priced for | A self-serve startup, from A$159/mo billed annually | An enterprise contract |
What gets identified, what doesn’t, and what we refuse to guess
Website visitor identification resolves a visit to the organization behind it using the network the visit came from. That works well for buyers on corporate networks and badly for everyone else, and the honest version of this page says which is which.
Identified reliably
- Corporate networksStaff browsing from an office or a work-issued device on the corporate range.
- Government & public sectorAgencies and departments on their own allocations — a large share of enterprise security buyers.
Identified partially, or not at all
- Remote staff on home broadbandResolves to a consumer ISP, so the organization is not recoverable. Filtered out rather than guessed at.
- Mobile networksCarrier-allocated, with no link to the employer.
- Commercial VPNsThe exit node is the VPN provider, not the visitor’s organization.
Deliberately refused
- Shared SASE & proxy gatewaysA Zscaler-style egress carries traffic from dozens of organizations. Naming one would be a guess, so Backstory returns nothing.
- Cloud & datacenter rangesServers and scrapers, not buyers.
- Bots and automated trafficRemoved before it reaches your list.
We don’t publish a match rate. It depends entirely on your traffic mix, and a single number quoted out of context would be the least honest thing on this page.
Identify the organization without the personal data
Most website visitor identification tools de-anonymize people. Backstory identifies the organization, never the individual who visited.
- First-party only — your own site traffic, nothing bought.
- Organization-level identification — the organization, never the individual who visited.
- No PII to identify the organization — IPs are truncated to a /24 network block before storage; the full address is never retained.
- Cookieless — nothing for visitors to accept, nothing for you to manage.
- Private by architecture — organization-level and cookieless from the ground up.
Built for cybersecurity vendors selling to the enterprise—where buyers browse from identifiable corporate networks. It’s honestly weak for home-broadband and mobile traffic, so it’s not for you if you sell to small businesses or consumers.
Questions security teams ask
- How accurate is website visitor identification?
- It depends entirely on where your visitors browse from. For buyers on corporate and government networks — which is most enterprise security evaluation — identification is reliable. For home broadband, mobile and commercial VPNs it is thin, and Backstory filters those out rather than guessing. We don’t publish a single match-rate figure because it would mean nothing without your traffic mix.
- How do you identify organizations visiting our website?
- Backstory reads the first-party network signal from each visit and resolves it to the organization behind it — a reverse-IP-to-organization match — then strips ISPs, VPNs, home broadband and cloud hosting. It is organization-level identification: the organization, never a named person.
- What happens with VPN or SASE traffic?
- A commercial VPN resolves to the VPN provider, so there is no organization to report and the visit is filtered out. A shared corporate SASE gateway is the harder case: it carries traffic from many organizations at once, so naming any one of them would be a guess. Backstory returns nothing for those rather than reporting whoever the IP block is registered to.
- Will it work if our buyers browse from home?
- Largely no, and we would rather say so. Home broadband resolves to a consumer ISP with no recoverable link to an employer. If your buyers are mostly remote and browsing personally, organization-level identification will be thin for you.
- Is this website visitor de-anonymization?
- At the organization level, yes — Backstory de-anonymizes anonymous traffic into the organizations behind it. It never de-anonymizes the individual who visited: no tracking of the person, cookieless.
- Can you identify individual visitors?
- No, and it is not a limitation we intend to remove. Identification is organization-level and uses no PII. Separately, the Contacts feature finds people who work at an identified organization in the job titles you target, from a business-contact database — never from anyone’s browsing.
See who’s evaluating you.
Add a snippet and start seeing the organizations on your site—and how close each one is to buying.
30-day free trial, no credit card required.