Every category where a model named Hunter for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Email verification	GTM data and infrastructure	10%	3 of 53	10%	39	accepted challenger
Sales intelligence and contact data	Sales	0%	10 of 44	0%	12	accepted challenger
Data enrichment	GTM data and infrastructure	0%	13 of 56	0%	8	under 10 labels · led by Apollo.io at 70%
CRM	Revenue operations	0%	46 of 71	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by HubSpot CRM at 41%
CRM data quality and deduplication	Revenue operations	0%	53 of 104	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Insycle at 34%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Hunter yet. The next is due October 1, 2026. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Hunter across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	1	0	0	0	1
GPT-5.4 mini	1	1	0	0	2
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	8	1	10
Perplexity Sonar	0	5	0	0	5
Grok 4.1 Fast	1	2	1	1	5
Mistral Small	1	4	2	0	7
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	4	2	0	7
Llama 4 Maverick	2	1	2	0	5
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	1	3	2	7
Kimi K2	0	5	0	0	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	3	0	0	3
MiniMax M2.5	0	3	1	0	4

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct29 labels5

Paraphrase26 labels6

Comparative37 labels4not counted in share

Budget-constrained26 labels3

Scale-constrained12 labelsNone

Negative29 labels6not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative159 labels in all, every segment counted; 14 of the 24 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Hunter ranked highest overall accuracy across small, medium, and large business domains and stands out as an all-in-one outreach platform.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Email verification · comparative prompt · first choice

“the tools that consistently ranked best on independent real-world accuracy were Hunter (~70%), Clearout (~68%), and Kickbox (~67%)” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Email verification · negative prompt · first choice

“Go with Hunter if doing sales prospecting (highest mid/large domain accuracy, bundled tools save costs)” Grok 4.1 Fast · Email verification · direct prompt · first choice

“the best email list validation tool for a mid-sized B2B company would be Hunter, Clearout, or Zerobounce” Llama 4 Maverick · Email verification · paraphrase prompt · first choice

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Many prospecting suites (like Hunter.io or Snov.io) bundle email verification into their monthly subscriptions... avoid tools that force you into recurring plans” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Email verification · negative prompt · soft negative

“Be Cautious With: Services like Hunter.io or Apollo, when used primarily for verification.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Email verification · negative prompt · soft negative

“but overpriced as a standalone verifier at ~$14.90/1K” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Email verification · direct prompt · soft negative

“Not ideal for pure bulk cleaning.” Grok 4.1 Fast · Email verification · comparative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Hunter, over the 159 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Hunter was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

ZeroBounce99 of 15928Compare →

NeverBounce72 of 1593Not in the top three

Bouncer69 of 15929Compare →

Apollo.io63 of 15934Not in the top three

Clearout60 of 1593Not in the top three

Kickbox57 of 1591Not in the top three

ZoomInfo44 of 1594Not in the top three

Emailable41 of 1591Not in the top three

Lusha41 of 1591Not in the top three

Cognism32 of 1594Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Hunter. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 23 of the 159 answers that named Hunter and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

hunter.ioYour site14

zerobounce.net13

usebouncer.com11

overloop.com10

pipeline.zoominfo.com9

cleanlist.ai7

mailtrap.io7

reddit.com7

emailvendorselection.com6

learn.g2.com6

Seventy-six of the ninety domain citations in answers naming Hunter came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

hunter.io/email-verification-guide/best-email-verifiers10

usebouncer.com/best-email-verification-tools8

zerobounce.net/8

mailtrap.io/blog/email-verification-tools7

overloop.com/blog/email-verification-guide7

emailvendorselection.com/email-verification-tools6

pipeline.zoominfo.com/marketing/email-verification-tools6

clearout.io/email-verification-tools5

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Hunter

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Hunter; a claim can dispute any of them.

Hunter.io 18Hunter (Email Verifier) 1

The company

Hunter.io is the company behind Hunter.

Website: hunter.io
Headquarters: United States
Founded: 2015

From Wikidata, fetched September 14, 2026. These describe the company, not the product's standing, and a claimed page can dispute any of them. · Wikidata · LinkedIn · Crunchbase

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Hunter's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Hunter, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at hunter.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.