To help you get the most out of Clay I've put together my top 10 external data sources I'm using almost daily. We're sending nearly 1M cold emails per month which just wouldn't be viable without these APIs.
Some of these you may already be familiar with, while others will hopefully help you level-up your Clay builds.
If you're looking for tutorials on connecting these APIs with Clay, make sure to have a look at Clay MBA and our section of free tutorials.
1. Serper
Getting results from Google SERPs would cost you 1 credit per row in Clay, which is pretty expensive for most use cases.
Some of my favourite use cases for scraping Google searches is finding specific pages for companies (for example their Glassdoor page, their Crunchbase page, etc.), or finding very specific pages or LinkedIn profiles.
However, Serper.dev also have a Google Maps scraped which let's you scrape & enrich local businesses from Clay without the headache of spending credits or jumping between tools.
If you haven't signed up for Serper yet, I can definitely recommend checking them out.
2. Firecrawl
A recent discovery of mine, Firecrawl may just be my number 1 pick from this list. They've recently launched an endpoint that has me very excited about using them and I think you'll feel the same.
First of all, Firecrawl is a scraper that allows you to grab any page in markdown format, making it easily digestible for LLMs. In simpler terms - Firecrawl lets you scrape website text from within Clay and run GPT prompts on it (or Claude if that has your fancy).
The way they present data makes it that you can easily use it as input for formulas or AI models without having to worry about formatting, input being too bloated, random code snippets, or anything else.
Second, their new 'LLM Extract' endpoint which is currently in Alpha is a very exciting bit of technology. It let's you ask questions about websites and get the answers back in a structured format.
Late in 2023 after selling our startup Lyne.ai, my former business partners and I made an attempt at building something similar. While we eventually gave up because we felt the demand just wasn't there, for my own personal use I absolutely loved it.
One of the most common objections for using Clay is that it's an expensive piece of tech. When comparing Clay to other software tools I can imagine people feel that way.
Luckily, Firecrawl have now built their own version and it's phenomenal. In the above example the questions being answered about 'mendable.ai' would be whether or not they support SSO (YES or NO), if they're open source (YES or NO), and what their company mission is (in a couple of sentences).
A very basic explanation of this would be that you can send parameters (like 'is_saas', 'is_b2b', etc.) and they translate those into questions which are then being answered based on all the text extracted from the website you're scraping.
Stay tuned for a full tutorial on using Firecrawl.
3. LinkedIn Data Scraper on RapidAPI
If you're not familiar with RapidAPI, it's a marketplace for APIs that 3rd parties like individual developers or companies are selling access to. Think of it like Etsy for renting programmatic data access.
My favourite discovery on there has been the LinkedIn Data Scraper offered by a developer called 'EZ'.
I won't go too much into detail about all the data being offered simply because it's a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT.
If this doesn't get you excited, I don't know what will.
4. Website Intelligence on RapidAPI
Another great find on RapidAPI has been the Website Intelligence endpoint by a guy named Anthony (thanks Anthony). From my research it does seem that the data is being offered by a company called Prospectlens.
The endpoint offers Crunchbase-like data but also Bombora intent topics and Semrush data, which makes me think they scraped a Crunchbase pro plan with add-ons and made that data available for querying.
Either way, they offer some great data that I know a lot of you would love access to. So don't wait around and give them a try!
5. The Companies API
Another personal favourite of yours truly is The Companies API. They do exactly what you'd expect from a company with that name -- they allow you to enrich companies with rich data.
Their API setup is easy, their pricing is very budget friendly, and their data is incredible.
Some of their data points include:
- Alexarank
- Revenue
- Email patterns
- Sub-industries
- Technologies
- Etc. etc. etc.
What more could you ask for?
6. Zenrows
Yes, Zenrows is a Clay integration already. So why add it to this list?
Simple - you have to add your own API key if you haven't already. Zenrows is the ideal scraping for so many tasks and if you're not using is daily, you're not using it enough.
Spending Clay credits on using it is a waste though. That's why paying a few bucks to set up your own Zenrows subscription is simply a great investment.
All you have to do next is add your API key to Clay and start scraping.
7. Findymail
You know that feeling when you've scraped a fresh batch of leads, only to see a valid email match rate of 30%? Findymail helps you fix that.
A big reason for low match rates is (in most cases) the catch_all category. Those are simple put emails that are likely valid, but couldn't be validated.
Findymail helps validate those emails so you'll be more confident on whether or not you can use them. In most cases this will drastically increase your match rate for emails found for your lead lists.
And who doesn't want that?
8. ScrapingBee
On the surface ScrapingBee may seem like yet another scraping service. So why add them to this list if Zenrows and Firecrawl have already been featured?
Well, there may be times where you're looking to scrape sites that are restricted by most scraping services, including the ones mentioned above. Think sites like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
ScrapingBee doesn't restrict those sites (yet), meaning that for those cases they're a great option. They have a very easy to use API, a great 'stealth proxies' feature to help you fly under the radar, and very helpful support.
9. Apify
However, when you dig a little deeper, you'll soon realise that Clay is just a very cheap employee or aggregation tool you can use to get data from around the web and manipulate it.
Apify is quickly becoming a household name in the cold outreach community. With the rise of Clay, Apify and it's incredible marketplace of scraping tools have risen with the tide and are now a big part of plenty of sales tech stacks.
They deserve a mention in this list simply because they allow you to connect almost any API that has your fancy. Best part is that Clay now directly integrates with Apify, making your life (a lot) easier.
From scraping LinkedIn to Yelp to lesser explored use cases of scraping the world wide web for sales data such as grabbing data from TrustPilot or Glassdoor.
Whatever you're looking to scrape, chances are you'll find a solution on the Apify marketplace.
What's next
Does the idea of connecting external APIs to Clay give you a headache? Or have you just connected your first external data source to Clay but you're stuck on what to do next?
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