Company profile

Ask

Ask.com was an American answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine operated by Ask Media Group and owned by People Incorporated. Founded in ...
Ask logo

Live profile

Last verified 13 days ago
kustiq.com/company/ask.com · cite this page

Ask.com was an American answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine operated by Ask Media Group and owned by People Incorporated. Founded in ...

Founded

1996

Funding

Series A ($25.0M)

Tech Stack

Fastly, GitHub Pages

G2 Rating

1.5/5 · 41 reviews

G2 Category

Dating Service

AI Classification

OtherOtherDating ServiceSearch Engine CompanyMedia Company

Ask.com is a consumer-facing web search and question-and-answer portal accessible via ask.com. The domain currently returns a 301 permanent redirect served by nginx, with no accessible page content available from the scrape.

Deep Intelligence

Account Scoring

High Churn Risk
  • Poor reviews (1.5/5, 41 ratings)
  • Thin digital footprint

Tech Stack

CDN

Fastly

Hosting

GitHub Pages

Social Links

Competitors

Google

Ask is one of 2,669 B2B companies in the Kustiq directory.

Similar profiles: Google, BrainTool - Beyond Bookmarks, Checkov, and MAVLink Guide.

Google was founded in 2020, 24 years after Ask. See Ask vs Google side by side.

Segment benchmark

How Ask compares with other Other companies

Ask is one of 91 Other companies profiled in the Kustiq Other directory, which holds 92 Other companies in total. Every number below is computed from those profiles.

The most common tech detections across the 43 peers with a visible stack are Cloudflare (37%), nginx (26%), and WordPress (26%). Ask lists none of them.

Among the 14 segment companies with disclosed funding, Growth is the most common stage (50%). Ask is at Series A.

The median founding year across 11 peers with a known founding date is 1996. Ask was founded in 1996.

Preston is the most common HQ city in this segment, home to 14% of the 7 peers with a known location.

Benchmarks are recomputed from live directory data, so they move as profiles refresh. Counts cover Kustiq-profiled companies, not the whole market.

How Kustiq built this profile

How this profile was built

  • Live web rendering via Browserless headless Chrome, not a stale cached scrape.
  • Search intelligence via Serper API across the company site, LinkedIn, press, and GitHub.
  • Claude only picks the buckets. It never decides facts.
  • 12-factor churn engine. Deterministic score, zero LLM at scoring time.
  • SMTP RCPT TO handshake on every contact, at delivery time on full profiles (paid plan).

This profile was built from 1 rendered page of ask.com, search coverage across the live web, and a review parse of 41 ratings on .

Read the full methodology in our LLM-readable reference or compare against the deterministic-vs-AI framework.

Frequently asked questions

What industry is Ask in?
Ask is a Other company in the Other segment. Related industry tags from the profile: Dating Service, Search Engine Company, Media Company.
Who are Ask's competitors?
Public sources list Google as Ask competitors. The list comes from live search coverage at the last profile run, not a static database.
When was Ask founded?
Ask was founded in 1996. The median founding year across 11 profiled Other peers is 1996.
Is this profile actually verified, or just generated by AI?
The structured fields come from a hybrid pipeline. Facts (location, employee range, funding, tech stack) come from live web rendering plus Serper search across the company site, LinkedIn, press, and GitHub. Claude only picks the buckets: vertical, segment, growth signal. It never decides facts. Contact emails on full profiles pass an SMTP RCPT TO handshake at delivery time.
How is this different from a contact database?
Kustiq profiles one company at a time, live from the web when you ask. Tools like Apollo and ZoomInfo rent access to a 50M+ row pool that ages every quarter. Different shape, different price, and the freshness story is the opposite.
What does "track this profile" do?
Tracking saves Ask to your free dashboard so you can re-run the full pipeline on it anytime. Free with a signed-in account: 3 profiles a week, no card.
Can the profiled company remove this page?
Any company in the Kustiq directory can request removal at /trust#removal. Removed profiles return 410 Gone and stay out of search.
How fresh is the data?
Ask was last verified 13 days ago. The data refreshes when anyone re-runs the profile (the Re-run now button above does exactly that), and we run the SMTP handshake on contacts when you ask for them, not when we cached the row. The freshness card above the profile shows the exact relative date for the current visit.
Part of 2,669 AI-profiled B2B companies

Profile your whole pipeline.

Sign up free, 3 profiles a week, no card. Save Ask and re-run every company you research whenever you need fresh data.