Why emails and phone numbers are hidden in search results
Search results show m***@cerv•••••.no instead of the real address. That is deliberate, it is not a paywall trick, and here is exactly when the real value appears.
Run a search and you will see rows like this:
| Name | Phone | |
|---|---|---|
| Cervello Tannlegesenter | m***@cerv•••••.no | +47 2* ** *0 90 |
The name, city, rating, review count, website domain, opening hours and every other field are shown in full. Only email addresses and phone numbers are masked, and only until you export.
Why
Contact details are the thing you are buying. If the preview showed them, the product would be free to anyone willing to scroll, and there would be no way to keep the index maintained. Masking is also the mechanism that lets us make the preview genuinely unlimited: because a preview cannot leak a contact, we do not have to ration it. You can search, filter and count as much as you like without spending a credit.
What the mask still tells you
The mask is not a black box. It preserves shape, which is often enough to make a decision:
m***@cerv•••••.no— there is an email, it is on the business's own domain rather than a free provider, and it starts withm(so probably a person, notinfo@).+47 2* ** *0 90— there is a phone number, it is Norwegian, and the2prefix says landline rather than mobile.- An empty cell means there genuinely is no value. We do not mask an absence — see why a listing has no email address.
Filter on presence, not on the mask
Do not squint at masks to work out who has an email. Use the Has email and Phone type filters — they operate on the real values, so a filtered count is exact.
When the real value appears
The moment an export completes. The file you download contains full, unmasked
Email, Phone and Phone international values for every
row in it, plus the whole All emails array. There is no separate "unlock" step and
no extra charge beyond the credits the export already cost.
The same rule holds over the API: a search response is always masked, an export is not. It is enforced server-side, so it is not something a browser extension or a request replay can get around.
Trial accounts see the same thing
Masking is not a trial limitation. Paid accounts see masked previews too. The trial's 100 credits buy 100 unmasked rows in an export, exactly as a paid credit does — see what the free trial includes.
If a mask looks wrong
A mask that shows a value where the export produces an empty cell is a bug, not a policy. Send us the search and the export id and we will look — how to report a record.
Updated on: