What is the difference between scraping and enrichment?

Both scraping and enrichment add data to your records, but they're legally and practically different. And the distinction matters for cold email compliance.

Scraping is automated extraction of data from websites without the website owner's permission. A script visits pages, reads the content, and pulls email addresses, names, or other contact information. Most websites prohibit this in their Terms of Service. LinkedIn's legal fight against hiQ Labs (which ran for years through the US courts) turned on exactly this question: whether automated extraction of publicly visible data is lawful. The short version: it's legally uncertain at best, explicitly prohibited by most major platforms, and buying or using scraped data exposes you to real compliance risk.

Enrichment starts from data you already have (a name, a company domain) and appends additional information from a data provider's existing database. The data provider has collected this information through their own methods and licensed it to you via an API. You're not extracting from websites directly. You're querying a database. That's meaningfully different from scraping, both legally and technically.

The compliance nuance: under GDPR, enriched data from a third-party provider still needs a lawful basis for processing. "We bought it from Clearbit" isn't a lawful basis by itself. You need to understand how the provider collected it, whether they have consent or a legitimate interest claim to share it, and whether your use of it meets those requirements. A reputable enrichment provider will be transparent about this. One that isn't is a risk signal.

Practically: enriched data tends to be cleaner and more accurate than scraped data, which is often stale. Your complaint rates on cold sends using scraped data are typically much higher, which damages your domain reputation regardless of legal risk. Validate any enriched contacts before sending with our email validation service.