Get the WhatsApp number and social links a business publishes on its own website

Updated 14 Oct 2026 · Disclosure: the Contact Details Scraper linked below is an Unadhi product on the Apify Store. This guide is free, the manual method needs no tool at all, and the Apify method works with any contact scraper that reads social links.

Why start from the business's own website

• It is the real account. A profile the business links from its own domain is the one it wants you to use. A name search on Instagram or Facebook can return look-alike, fan or abandoned pages.
• It is the channel they chose. Many shops, clinics, coaches and service businesses (especially in India, the Gulf, Latin America and Africa) answer WhatsApp faster than email. If they put a chat button on the site, that is an invitation to message them.
• It avoids scraping social networks. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn generally forbid automated collection in their terms. Reading a business's own public pages politely, and following its robots.txt, is a different and much safer job.

Step 1: check the places businesses link their profiles

• Floating chat button, usually a green WhatsApp icon in a bottom corner. Hover or long-press to see the wa.me or api.whatsapp.com link behind it.
• Header and footer icons: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, TikTok and so on.
• Contact page (/contact, /contact-us, /kontakt): often lists the WhatsApp number in text and links the same number.
• About and team pages: LinkedIn company pages and YouTube channels often live here.
• Page source: press Ctrl+U and search for wa.me, instagram.com or sameAs. Many sites list all their profiles in structured data (a JSON-LD sameAs list) even when the icons are hidden on mobile.

Step 2: read the WhatsApp number from the link

Example numbers only, to show the format. Not real businesses.

Step 3: write down only what is published

Example rows only, to show the layout. Not real company data.

Keep the "found on" column: it is your proof the business published the link, and it lets you re-check later. Leave out personal profiles such as a founder's linkedin.com/in/… page. They identify a person, so they need a separate, lawful reason.

Step 4: for a list of websites, run a contact scraper on Apify

Checking five sites by hand takes a few minutes. For a hundred, a contact-details Actor visits each homepage plus its most contact-like pages and reads the links for you, including links hidden in the page source.

1. Create a free Apify account (no card needed for the free plan; see apify.com/pricing for the current monthly free usage).
2. Open the Website Contact Scraper: Emails, Phones & WhatsApp and click Try for free. Current pricing is shown on that Store page.
3. Paste your homepages. In JSON view a privacy-safe input looks like this:

{
  "urls": ["example-bakery.in", "example-clinic.ae"],
  "maxPagesPerSite": 4,
  "includePersonalEmails": false,
  "includePersonProfiles": false,
  "respectRobotsTxt": true,
  "respectTermsOfService": true,
  "defaultCountry": "IN"
}

• includePersonProfiles: false (the default) drops personal LinkedIn /in/ profiles; company pages are always kept.
• maxPagesPerSite: 4 reads the homepage plus the most contact-like pages (contact, about, impressum, support). Profile links are almost always on these.
• respectRobotsTxt and respectTermsOfService skip pages a site disallows for bots and sites whose terms forbid automated access. Social networks and marketplaces are skipped by design. Leave both on.
• Set defaultCountry to the country most of your sites are in, so local-format phone numbers in the page text are read correctly.

Click Save & Start. Each output row is one website, with a socials object holding the links found for each network (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram and others), each with the page it was found on. WhatsApp click-to-chat numbers are also turned into international-format phone numbers in the phones list, with a ready wa.me link. Sites that blocked crawling come back as blocked-by-robots or blocked-by-terms: respect that and check them by hand instead.

Starting from a Google Maps dataset on Apify? Pass its dataset ID instead of URLs; see enrich a Google Maps Apify dataset with emails and phones.

Step 5: check the result and use it the way it was offered

• Export as CSV or Excel and keep the "found on" page for every link.
• Open a sample of rows: make sure the Instagram or LinkedIn link really belongs to that business (some sites link their web designer in the footer).
• Message one business at a time, about something relevant to what they sell. A click-to-chat button is not consent to be added to a broadcast list, a group or a bulk sender. WhatsApp's business rules require opt-in, and bulk unsolicited messages get numbers banned.

Common mistakes

• Treating a chat.whatsapp.com group invite as the business's number.
• Copying the web agency's links from a "Website by…" footer credit.
• Scraping Instagram or Facebook directly for phone numbers. Their terms forbid it; start from the business's own site.
• Keeping a list for months. Numbers and handles change; re-check the "found on" page before you write.

Related guides

• Find public role emails (sales@, press@, support@) on a company website
• Enrich a Google Maps Apify dataset with emails and phones
• Copy-paste inputs for the Contact Details and Product scrapers
• Build a weekly competitor price sheet from Shopify stores (uses our E-commerce Product Scraper)

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Unadhi Guides are free, independent explainers. We correct errors as soon as we find them: write to mininglife7@gmail.com.