Can I see which people visited my website?

Not from the visit alone. At best you learn the organisation that owns the network the visit came from. Tools that claim to name individual visitors rely on other data, such as cookies matched to identities, which raises privacy questions this method avoids.

Why can't small companies be identified?

Most small companies use a shared internet provider, so their traffic comes from the provider's network, not their own. The registry shows the provider, not the customer.

What about people working from home?

Their visits come from a home broadband or mobile network owned by the provider. They cannot be tied to an employer this way.

What should I do when a target company visits?

Look at which pages they read, then find the people at that company who would buy, and write to them about the problem those pages address, without saying you tracked their visit.

Which companies visit your website? What IP lookup can and cannot tell you

How company identification actually works

Every visit to your site comes from an IP address. IP addresses are allocated in blocks, and the regional internet registries (RIPE NCC for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia; ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC elsewhere) keep public records of who holds each block. RIPE describes its database as containing "registration information for networks in the RIPE NCC service region and related contact details", searchable by anyone.

So for any visit you can ask: who holds the network this address belongs to? Sometimes the answer is a company: a bank, a manufacturer, a university, a council. Much more often, the answer is an internet provider or a mobile network.

That single fact decides what this source can do.

Who you can see, and who you cannot

Visitor	Network owner in the registry	Identifiable?
Employee at a large company, in the office	The company	Usually yes
University staff or student on campus	The university	Yes
Government or council office	The public body	Often yes
Small company on a business broadband line	The internet provider	No
Anyone working from home	The broadband provider	No
Anyone on a phone's mobile data	The mobile network	No
Anyone on a VPN	The VPN provider	No
Office in a co-working space	The space or its provider	No, or the wrong company

In plain terms: this method finds larger organisations that run their own network, and misses most small businesses entirely. If you sell to companies with fewer than fifty people, most of your visitors will be invisible, and that is the honest answer, not a bug.

What a useful visit looks like

A company name alone is a weak signal. Plenty of visits are a job seeker, a student, a supplier or a competitor's employee. What makes a visit worth acting on:

The pages read. Pricing, a comparison page, an integration page or a case for their industry is stronger than the blog home page.
Repeat visits across days, especially from the same organisation reading different buying pages.
Fit. The organisation is in your target size and industry.
More than one visit pattern. Several distinct sessions from one company suggests more than one person is looking.

A single blog visit from a huge company is noise.

How to do it by hand

Export visitor IP addresses from your server or hosting logs for a period, with the pages requested. Analytics tools often hide IPs, so logs are the usual route.
Look up each address in the relevant registry's public database (or a WHOIS lookup) and note the network holder.
Discard providers, mobile networks, hosting companies and VPNs. This will remove most rows.
Group what remains by organisation and list the pages each read.
Keep the organisations that fit and read buying pages.
Find the right people there: the role that buys what those pages describe.
Write to them about the problem, not about the visit. "Saw someone at your company on our pricing page" is unsettling; a useful note about the problem is not.

Then decide what to do with the logs. IP addresses can be personal data, so keep only what you need and only as long as you need it.

What you can and cannot learn

You can learn: the network holder for some visits, the time, and the pages requested.

You cannot learn: who the person was, their role, or anything about visitors on shared or consumer networks. Registry data says who holds a network block, which is not always who sits behind it.

Etiquette and privacy

The tone of outreach matters more here than anywhere. People do not expect a sales email because they read a web page, and telling them you watched them is the quickest way to lose them. Use the visit to decide who to contact and what to say about, not as the opening line.

On privacy, the method described here needs no cookie and no profile of the person, only the network holder. Approaches that match visitors to named individuals work very differently and carry more obligations.

Why it disappoints

Small-company markets. If your buyers are small, you will see few or none.
Remote work. Teams working from home appear as broadband customers.
Wrong conclusions. A visit from a big company's network may be one curious employee, not a buying committee.
Creepy outreach. Mentioning the visit damages the very interest it signalled.

How Sluice does it

Sluice gives you a one-line snippet for your site. Companies that own their network appear with the pages they read, worked out from who owns the IP range in public registry data. There is no cookie and no stored IP. Visitors on home broadband or mobile cannot be identified, and Sluice does not guess them. From any company that appears, "People there" turns it into a directory search for the people who decide; previews are free, and only people scoring 70 or more against your profile are revealed, at 5 cents each.

The honest limit, stated plainly: most small companies on shared providers are invisible to this, and so are remote workers. If that describes your market, put your effort into companies hiring, job changes or LinkedIn instead. If it does fit, the pricing page shows what the reveals cost, and what a lead actually costs works through the arithmetic.