As of 13 August 2026, AI can find companies in your target market.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Write a short target-market brief covering your offer, customer problem, UK geography, company-size range, required fit signals and exclusions.
   2. Open a chatbot with web access, paste the prompt, replace every bracketed slot with your brief, and ask it to produce the sourced company table.
   3. Export or copy the resulting company names, websites, evidence and source links into a spreadsheet.
   4. Open each company website and compare its current products, location and target customers against your required fit signals, deleting companies that fail the criteria.
   5. Check each remaining company in a reliable public source and update the spreadsheet where the AI's size, ownership, location or activity claim is unsupported or outdated.
   6. Mark the final companies as suitable, uncertain or excluded, then send only the suitable group into your normal CRM or approved outreach workflow.

   Prompt

   Find companies that match this target market: [describe the industry, customer problem and offer].
   
   Geography: [UK regions or locations]
   Company size: [employee range, turnover range or other measure]
   Business model: [B2B, B2C, public sector or other]
   Required fit signals: [specific products, sector, technology, hiring pattern, certification or other evidence]
   Exclusions: [companies or categories to leave out]
   Number of companies wanted: [number]
   
   Use current public information if you have web access. Do not invent companies, facts, contacts or fit signals. Return a table with company name, website, location, apparent size, evidence that it matches, source link, source date if available, and a confidence level. Separate directly verified facts from reasonable inferences. Exclude any company where the fit cannot be supported by a source. End with the search gaps and the checks I must complete before contacting anyone.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.