How many companies are selling access to you?

The short answer: hundreds, and nobody knows exactly

If you work in B2B and you have ever filled in a form, attended a webinar, or simply had a job title on a company website, you are a row in a large number of commercial databases. The obvious question is how many. It turns out to be a genuinely hard question, and the reasons it is hard tell you more about the industry than any single number would.

The best legal proxy is state data broker registration. A joint analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found that 750 companies had registered as data brokers in at least one US state. California's registry alone listed close to 600 firms in 2026. Neither figure is a count of B2B sales-data companies specifically, because the same registries cover people-search sites, credit and risk data, location data, and advertising identity graphs.

The industry-wide backdrop: the 2026 marketing technology landscape counted 15,505 products, up just 0.79% on the prior year. That plateau hides real churn, with 1,488 products added and 1,367 removed in a single year. Any list of vendors, including this one, is a snapshot of a moving target.

Three reasons there is no clean total

The legal category and the commercial category are not the same shape

"Data broker" is a statutory term covering any business that knowingly sells personal information about people it has no direct relationship with. That definition captures ZoomInfo, and it also captures a company selling home addresses to bail bondsmen. Meanwhile plenty of firms that clearly hold data about you describe themselves as a "go-to-market platform" or a "revenue AI" company and argue their way out of the label. Counting by legal registration and counting by what a company actually does give you two different lists.

The registries undercount, and it is measurable

Four US states now require registration. Comparing those registries against each other reveals large gaps: the same EFF and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse analysis found 291 companies that registered somewhere but not in California, 524 missing from Texas, 475 from Oregon, and 309 from Vermont. Some of that is legitimate variation between state definitions. Some of it is not. And by construction, that study could only examine companies that registered somewhere. A firm that ignored every state law appears in no count at all.

The two categories in this piece are merging into each other

The tidy division of a decade ago, where one set of companies sold contact records and another sold behavioural signals, no longer holds. Contact vendors now sell intent. Intent vendors now sell contacts. Review sites bought each other. Any company you count once may belong in both halves of this page, which is what the consolidation section below is about.

Five ways a company comes to hold data about you

Every company in the tables below is tagged with its primary collection mechanism. This is the distinction that matters, and it is the one the category names obscure: the difference between these businesses is not what they sell, it is how the data was obtained and whether you were part of the transaction.

Part one. The contact layer: companies like ZoomInfo

These companies sell a record of you: name, job title, employer, work email, and frequently a direct-dial mobile number. The product is coverage and accuracy, the pricing is a seat licence plus credits, and the buyer is a sales or revenue operations team.

ZoomInfo is the reference point because it is the largest and the only pure-play public company in the set. It reported full-year 2025 revenue of $1.25 billion, serving more than 30,000 customers. Its marketing materials claim 321 million professional profiles, 104 million company profiles, 174 million verified emails and 70 million direct dials, though its own investor communications have described the global contact database as passing 235 million professional profiles. That gap is worth noticing: these are marketing numbers, not audited ones, and "profiles" and "verified contacts" are counted differently by every vendor in the category.

The wider sales intelligence market was estimated at $4.99 billion in 2026, forecast to reach $9.15 billion by 2031. That money is spent almost entirely on one activity: finding and contacting people who have not asked to be contacted.

Part two. The intent layer: companies like 6sense

The second industry sells something different. Not who you are, but what you appear to be researching, and when. The pitch to a vendor is timing: reach the account while it is in market, before a competitor does, and ideally before the buyer makes contact.

6sense is the reference point here. It has raised around $526 million, was last valued at $5.2 billion, and reached roughly $265 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. The broader intent data market was estimated at $4.49 billion in 2026, projected to reach $20.89 billion by 2035 at a 16.6% compound growth rate. That is a faster growth profile than the contact layer, and it tells you where the industry believes the future is.

"Intent" is not one thing. It comes from four quite different places, and the distinction determines how much it can actually see:

• Co-operative and bidstream data. A network of publisher websites reports the topics being read from a given corporate network. Bombora's co-op alone spans more than 5,000 B2B websites. This is normally resolved to your employer, not to you.
• Review and research sites. When someone at your company compares products on a software review site, that activity is first-party to the site and can be sold as intent, sometimes with the individual attached.
• Content syndication. A gated whitepaper collects your real details, and the record is licensed to the vendor who sponsored it, priced per lead.
• Visitor identification. A tag on the vendor's own website resolves your visit against an identity graph, returning a company or, increasingly, a person. We covered that mechanism step by step here.

Two industries becoming one

The most useful thing about counting these companies is watching the count fall. Consolidation over the last eighteen months has been steady, and it moves in one direction: combining who you are with what you are reading.

• HG Insights acquired TrustRadius in June 2025, joining review-based intent to technology install data. The pitch is no longer just that an account is researching your category, but what it currently runs.
• G2 acquired Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner in early 2026, consolidating four software research destinations into a single first-party behavioural dataset.
• Informa Tech merged with TechTarget, combining a large technology publishing estate with the best-known permissioned intent product.
• Intentsify acquired Salutary Data in January 2026, adding contact and technographic data underneath a pure intent business.
• ZoomInfo assembled the same combination by acquisition over several years: Clickagy for intent, Chorus for conversation data, Comparably for employer data, Datanyze for technographics.

The pattern is not subtle. A contact record on its own is a commodity. A contact record plus evidence that the person is in market right now is worth many times more. Every serious company in either half of this page is trying to hold both.

What this means if you are the buyer

Set the vendor names aside and look at the structure. Dozens of companies each hold a partial, decaying copy of your professional identity. None of them acquired it from you. Most will never tell you they have it. The signal they sell about your intentions is inferred from proxies, so it is frequently wrong, and there is no mechanism for you to correct it because you are not the customer.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth separating because people usually collapse them into a general unease.

• Your attention is allocated without your involvement. The volume of outreach you receive is set by how well the market thinks it has scored you, not by whether you want to hear from anyone.
• Being wrong about you costs the industry nothing. A false intent signal produces a bad email you delete. It produces no penalty for the vendor who bought it and no correction to the record.
• Withdrawing is not a single action. Because the data is re-derived on each refresh cycle from sources that never received your request, an opt-out is a maintenance task rather than a switch.

What you can actually do about it

If you are in California, use DROP

The Delete Act created a single deletion request that reaches every broker registered with the state, instead of filing with each company individually. The platform opened to consumers on 1 January 2026, and more than 300,000 Californians had submitted requests by spring. From 1 August 2026 registered brokers must check the platform at least every 45 days, delete the associated data including inferences, and report status back. Penalties run to $200 per request per day, with no cure period. This is the single highest-leverage action available to anyone it applies to.

If you are in the EU or UK, the request is stronger but manual

GDPR gives you a right of access, a right to erasure, and, most usefully here, a right to object to processing for direct marketing that has no balancing test attached. That last one is close to absolute. The work is that you must send it to each controller yourself, and you need to know they hold your data in order to ask.

Everywhere else, it is per-company and it is tedious

Most of the vendors above operate an opt-out or suppression form, of varying sincerity. The practical strategy is to start with the wholesale suppliers rather than the retail products, because the infrastructure companies feed many of the others. Our opt-out toolkit has the links and the wording.

One limit worth knowing before you start: none of this stops your details being re-collected. Suppression usually means "do not include this record", which holds only while the record is recognised as the same record. A new email format, a job change, or a different source can reintroduce you. These mechanisms are worth using, and they are a maintenance routine rather than a fix.

Where Moniker fits

Every company on this page is answering the same question: how do we work out who this buyer is and what they want, without asking them. The competition is over who infers it best. Moniker is built on the position that the question is wrong.

A Moniker is a verified alias identity. Vendors receive an alias address and three deliberately coarse company fields you selected yourself: industry, size band, and headquarters country. Your real name, employer and job title sit in a separate table that no vendor-facing query can reach, enforced by database-level row security rather than by policy. The alias can be reset, and when it is, the vendors you approved keep reaching you and everyone else starts from zero. That is a claim about mechanism, and it is checkable.

Two limits stated plainly, because a product about trust cannot be vague about its own scope. Today this applies to email: the address you hand a vendor, and what is inferred from it. It does not yet change what happens when you browse a vendor's website, which is the visitor identification layer above and needs a browser extension to address. And Moniker does not remove you from any database listed here. It changes what the next one is able to collect.

See how Moniker works →   The data broker problem →   Opt-out toolkit →

Sources

• EFF and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, analysis of state data broker registries (750 registered in at least one state; 291, 524, 475 and 309 absent from California, Texas, Oregon and Vermont)
• California Privacy Protection Agency, Data Broker Registry
• CPPA, Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) (1 August 2026 processing obligation, 45-day cycle, penalty schedule)
• chiefmartec, 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape (15,505 products; 1,488 added, 1,367 removed)
• ZoomInfo, full-year 2025 results (SEC Form 8-K exhibit)
• ZoomInfo, global business contacts announcement
• Sales intelligence market sizing, 2026 to 2031
• 6sense funding, valuation and ARR
• Forrester, The Intent Data Providers For B2B Landscape, Q3 2026 (published 24 August 2026; note that a Forrester Landscape is an inclusion overview of a category, not a ranked evaluation)
• G2, expanded Buyer Intent across four software discovery platforms
• Intentsify, expansion and Salutary Data acquisition
• Practitioner analysis of visitor identification match rates and the GDPR position