You looked up a contact and prospiq returned nothing. That's frustrating — but it's also working exactly as intended. Here's what it means and what to do.
What "no result" means
A blank result means we couldn't find an address that passes our verification standards. It's not a guess we held back. It's not a paywalled answer. We genuinely have nothing we'd stand behind.
You spent zero credits.
Common reasons we come back empty
The person doesn't have a discoverable work email
Some people just don't. Founders of very small companies who use only a personal address. Employees too new for their email to be in any verified source yet. People who left a company recently — their old mailbox is gone before our checks can confirm a new one.
The company domain doesn't accept verification queries
Some mail servers reject verification attempts as a security policy. We can't tell if a mailbox exists, so we don't return a guess. This is more common with small businesses on certain hosting providers, and with companies that deploy strict anti-scraping measures.
The domain is a catch-all
Catch-all domains accept every email address, valid or not. That breaks verification — we can't tell john@company.com from xyz123@company.com because the server says yes to both. Rather than return an address that might be junk, we return nothing.
The mailbox check is temporarily failing
Sometimes a mail server is throttling our connection or temporarily unavailable. We retry, but if we still can't reach a verification result, we return no result. Trying again in a few hours often works.
The name or company is ambiguous
If you typed "John Smith, Microsoft" with no other details, we might find too many John Smiths and not enough confidence to pick one. Including a LinkedIn URL, a job title, or a more specific company variant usually fixes this.
What to do when you get an empty result
1. Check the input. A typo in the name or a slightly wrong company spelling can make the difference. "Acme Corp" and "Acme Corporation" can route to different records.
2. Try a LinkedIn URL instead. If you have one, a LinkedIn profile URL is the strongest possible identifier — far more precise than name + company alone.
3. Try the company search. If you can't pin down a specific person but you know the company, our company search returns the people we can find at that domain. You may find your target there, or find a better path to them.
4. Come back later. Email server availability changes over hour-to-hour. A domain that was rejecting verification this morning may respond cleanly this afternoon. Empty results aren't always permanent.
5. Tell us. If you keep coming back empty on contacts you're certain should be findable, email support. Sometimes there's a domain we haven't seen before, and your feedback is what tells us to look closer.