How to Find a Cell Phone Number
Over half of Americans have only a cell phone number and less than 40% of US households have a landline. So, if you need to get someone’s phone number using a name, city, and state, you’re most often trying to find a cell phone number.
Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to find a cell phone number than it is to find a landline. On the bright side, once you’ve found a cell phone number, you have a lot more options for contacting that person. Cell phone numbers can be used to communicate with your customers more easily and for text messages and emails.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You have to find a cell phone number before you can use it.
You can try to find someone’s cell phone number online for free. However, free cell phone lookup methods and services are unreliable at best. And, searching the internet for cell phone numbers can be very time-consuming. That’s not ideal for professionals, businesses, or anyone else.
But there is a way to get verified cell phone numbers, which we’ll cover momentarily.
First, we’re going to answer some common questions about how to find a cell phone number. Once the waters are cleared, we’ll show you how to find a cell phone number (and be certain that it’s the cell phone number you need).
Is there a directory for cell phones?
Phone directories—even for landlines—are pretty much a thing of the past. When is the last time you received a phone book?
However, cell phone numbers are even more scattered than landline telephone numbers. Cell phone numbers are owned by cell carriers. There are several cell phone carriers, which means that cell phone information is stored in many private databases. And, the carriers don’t give cell phone information to just anyone.
So, not only is it challenging to find cell phone numbers, even if you found out where the information was stored, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to access it.
In short, there’s no official or reliable directory for cell phones.
Are cell phone numbers public information?
The answer is related to the fact that cell carriers own the cell phone numbers. Your cell phone number is the property of your cell phone carrier. And, your contract with the cell carrier essentially allows you to lease that phone number from the carrier.
As such, cell phone numbers are not public information.
But what about the records? Are cell phone records public information?
Also no. The cell phone records are associated with the cell phone number, and are subject to the same privacy policies and laws as cell phone numbers.
This means that a cell phone carrier is not obligated to release someone’s cell phone number or cell phone records, unless they are required by law to supply that information.
Can you Google search a phone number?
Absolutely. You can search for anything on Google.
However, there’s no guarantee that any phone number you find is valid, connected, or even belongs to the person Google says it belongs to. And, you’ll get a lot of ads trying to convince you they have the information you need, you just need to sign up for a membership. Boooo.
The reason the cell phone numbers you find with a Google search are usually inaccurate is because Google searches all the information on the internet. Google doesn’t care if the information is up-to-date, accurate, or where it came from. Google is just a glorified content curator now and sells advertising (billions of dollars worth a year). It just finds instances of that phone number and shows them in the search results making it very confusing and causing a lot of wasted time.
Or, if you search a name on Google to find a record with a cell phone number in it, you’ll most likely get a lot of records with the same name or more sites trying to sell you a subscription service so be careful. Each record will could even a different phone number associated. And, it will be impossible to sort out which phone number you need.
So, if you find a phone number with a Google search, it’s impossible to know is it a cell or is it a landline, or any other information about that phone number without calling it, and you certainly don’t want to dial a dozen wrong numbers.
Short answer: Google is not a reliable source of cell phone information. But you can certainly Google search a phone number.
What is the best search engine to find a cell phone number?
Google may still be the best search engine to find a cell phone number if you’re going to do your own cell phone lookups on the internet. Just know that cell phone lookup results from Google a probably not accurate. But, other search engines—Bing, Yahoo!, Duckduckgo, etc.—really aren’t any better. In fact, they might be worse. Using a search engine to find cell phone numbers is hit and miss, regardless of which search engine you use.
How do you search phone numbers on Facebook?
Did you know that Facebook has a search bar? And, you can simply type a phone number into the Facebook search bar. And, Facebook will find instances of that phone number on the platform. How about that!
However, there are some factors that affect your results when you search for phone numbers on Facebook. Your search results depend on:
- Whether or not you’re friends with the owner of the phone number.
- Whether or not the owner of the phone number shared their phone number on their Facebook profile.
- The completeness of the person’s Facebook profile. Many Facebook users don’t add their phone number to their Facebook account.
- The person’s presence on social media. If they don’t have a Facebook account, their phone number will never show up in a Facebook search.
So, searching for cell phone numbers on Facebook is easy. But the results are more limiting and often worse than a Google search. But, hey, you can get lucky, so it’s worth a try if you have time.
How can I find someone’s cell phone number?
So far, the solutions haven’t been great. But, there’s good news. Time to answer the big question: how to find a cell phone number?
You can find someone’s cell phone number. And, with the method we’re about to show you, the phone number will be verified. That means that you’ll know for certain that it’s connected and who it belongs to.
Getting verified cell phone information isn’t free. But it’s very affordable. You can find a cell phone number for just a few bucks.
However, you need more than just a name to find a cell phone number. There are simply too many people with the same names to differentiate them without additional information.
A name and an address are often enough to get reliable cell phone information. With an address, you can do a reverse address lookup to get a cell phone number.
Doing a reverse address lookup is easy and fast. You can do one in your browser almost as easily as you run a Google search.
Just pop open the Searchbug reverse address lookup tool and type the information into the form fields. Then, buy a few search tokens, and you’ll have a phone number in a few minutes, total.
Additionally, you’ll typically get more information than just the phone number when available:
- Full name.
- Complete street address.
- Phone number.
- Email address.
So, you get even more options for contacting the person you’re looking for.
If you need to find a lot of phone numbers—maybe you’ve got a customer list that needs phone numbers, or your whole contact list needs an update—you can use our batch append tool to get phone numbers for whole lists of names and addresses.
It’s more cost-efficient to get phone numbers in bulk. When you use our batch append service you can get phone numbers for less than a buck apiece. And, depending on how many numbers you need, you could get your entire list of cell phone numbers in a matter of minutes for small lists.
Every phone number our service finds for you has been verified to be reported using the information you provided. So, you know the phone numbers you get are dependable.
Finally, there’s one more question to answer about cell phone lookups.
Can you find someone’s name by their cell phone number?
Yes, you can.
However, just like doing a cell phone number lookup, you can’t find dependable information for free. Finding someone’s name by their cell phone number also costs about a buck per phone number.
To get a verified name and address from a phone number, just use our reverse phone lookup service. It works the same as the reverse address lookup. Just open the page in your browser, type the phone number into the search bar, grab a few search tokens, and go. You can even use the Detailed History Report (shown in the image below) to search for a new phone number from an old phone number.
You’ll have a name and address from cell phone number before you know it!
Our batch append tool does the same thing, but in bulk. So, if you have a whole list of cell phone numbers, and you need names, try our batch append tool. As a bonus, you can get names and addresses for a matter of pennies per record when you use our batch append service.
What to do now
That covers it. You can always try doing a free cell phone lookup on the internet. And, you might find something.
But, if you need dependable data, the Searchbug people search tools are the most cost-efficient and reliable methods when you need to find a cell phone number. And, there are no monthly minimums, no subscriptions, and no waiting.
Need to get verified information now?
Find cell phone numbers in bulk.
Or find someone’s name by their cell phone number.
