Company Website Status API: Check If a Business Site Is Live

A company website status API reports whether a business’s website still responds or redirects, and when that was last measured. It is a cheap way to find dead or abandoned accounts in a CRM before reps waste time on them. Treat the result as a dated signal, not as proof the company has closed.

What the endpoint does

The BusinessMCP Company Data API lists a website status endpoint at GET /api/hub/v1/companies/{domain}/status, priced at $0.005 per call. According to the page, it returns whether the site still responds or redirects plus the date the crawler last measured it, and it is explicitly not a live check during your call. That makes it five to ten times cheaper than a full company lookup at the listed prices, and well suited to hygiene jobs at scale.

Why status is useful

Dead domains pile up in any CRM. Companies close, merge, rebrand and move domains; old leads decay. A status field lets you:

• Remove dead sites from active outreach lists.
• Prioritise live accounts in scoring.
• Spot rebrand or acquisition candidates, where a domain now redirects somewhere else.
• Reduce bounce rates for email campaigns aimed at obviously abandoned domains.

Reading the result

Observed	Possible meaning	Suggested action
Responds	Site up at last crawl	Keep in active set
Redirects	Domain moved or merged	Follow the redirect target; update account
Does not respond	Down, parked or closed	Flag for manual review
Old measurement date	Stale reading	Treat with caution; re-check before acting

Key takeaway: website status tells you the site’s condition on a past date. Always read the measured-at date alongside the status.

Interpreting redirects carefully

A redirect is ambiguous. It can mean the company rebranded, was acquired, or simply redirects example.com to www.example.com. Compare the registrable domain before and after: if only the subdomain changed, ignore it; if the destination is a different registrable domain, create a review task. Never auto-merge accounts on a redirect alone.

A CRM hygiene workflow

1. Export accounts with a domain and no recent activity.
2. Clean and deduplicate domains, as in domain to company API.
3. Run status checks, or run bulk lookups if you also need firmographics.
4. Tag results: live, redirected, not responding.
5. Send “not responding” to a human review list; do not delete.
6. Re-check “not responding” domains after a few weeks, since outages end and recrawls update the date.
7. Record the measured-at date in a CRM field.

The same status information is also returned within the lookup response, per the provider, so if you are already enriching you may not need a separate call. Check the API reference for exact fields.

Limits to remember

• Not live. A site may have gone down yesterday and still show as responding.
• Not proof of business status. A working website does not mean a trading company, and a down site does not mean a closed one.
• Coverage. Unknown domains return not-found, with no on-demand crawl, according to the provider’s comparison page.
• Search excludes offline sites. The page says company search results leave out companies whose websites are offline, which affects how you build lists.

Cost example

At $0.005 per call, checking 20,000 unique domains costs about $100 if every call is billed, though the page states charges apply under its found-based model, so your actual spend may be lower where results are not found. Confirm billing on the pricing page before a large run, and see our pricing article for how to model it.

Using status in scoring

Add a small score modifier rather than a hard rule. A live site is weakly positive; a dead one is strongly negative for outbound, but only if the measurement is recent. Combine it with other signals and revisit thresholds against actual win rates. Keep it a hygiene signal and keep humans in the loop for anything irreversible.

Building a status field that people trust

A bare “live” or “dead” label invites bad decisions. Store three things in your CRM: the status, the measured-at date from the API, and the date you fetched it. Show the measured-at date in the record view so a rep sees “Responded, measured 12 days ago” instead of an unqualified “Live”. If the measured date is older than your threshold, say 60 days, show the status as “stale” and refresh it before any outreach.

Edge cases to plan for

• Maintenance pages. A site showing a maintenance notice may still count as responding.
• Geo-blocking. A site that blocks the crawler’s region may appear down.
• Redirect to a login page. Common for B2B tools; the company is live even if the homepage is not public.
• Single-page parked domains that respond but belong to no operating business.
• Domain changes after a rebrand, where the old domain redirects to the new one.

None of these is solved by an API alone. Keep the human review step for anything that triggers deletion, merging or account closure.

Pairing status with enrichment

Because the provider says the lookup response includes website status, a single lookup call may give you both firmographics and status. Use the dedicated status endpoint when you only need hygiene, since it is priced lower at $0.005 per call. For large clean-ups, send domains through bulk lookup once and store everything, rather than making repeated separate calls.

A hygiene schedule

Quarterly is enough for most CRMs. Each quarter, select accounts without recent activity, run status checks, and review the not-responding group. Close or archive confirmed dead accounts, update domains for rebrands, and record the outcome. Over a few cycles your outreach lists get cleaner and bounce rates fall. Pair this with the real-time data article so everyone understands what a status reading represents.

Related checks

Website status says nothing about whether a domain can receive email. For that, see email pattern lookup, which reports MX status. And for the wider job of turning domains into company records in the first place, start with domain to company API.