Blog - Applegate: a personal look back at a directory’s rise and fade

Applegate has shut down.

The company appointed a voluntary liquidator in June 2025 and the domain now appears to have been sold/redirected.

I remember Applegate from the very beginning. They were incorporated in May 2000 and I was using them by about 2002—first to find companies to cold-call, and later when I worked in a call centre.

Back then the format was the classic business directory (see the old thumb image). For a while it worked: Applegate delivered traffic, mainly from Google. They sold Bronze/Silver/Gold packages and “Hot Links,” which—according to the Wayback Machine—were randomly positioned on the right-hand side of many pages. For a time they were a cost-effective way to put new eyes on a page.

The decline

Effectiveness tailed off. By around 2006 (at the latest) I’d stopped recommending them. Many large advertisers stayed on out of habit and because they couldn’t really measure ROI, but whenever I worked with a customer who’d bought one of the packages the results just weren’t there. Applegate seemed to trundle on fumes.

They did try to pivot into a B2B marketplace—I remember talk of an Alibaba connection—and they were later bought (in 2022) by the Troy Group. But I don’t have a clear view of what they truly achieved post-2006. My hunch is they coasted for a long time.

Their June 2025 Statement of Affairs lists roughly 264 companies that look like subscribers, plus pages of creditors and only a modest pot of assets—classic signs that unsecured creditors were unlikely to see much back.

Why it ended (my view)

I’m guessing, but the most likely cause is simply Google. The directory model lost its punch years ago. Applegate also didn’t help itself by expanding listings so heavily that their pages ended up larger than many customers’ own sites—recycling client content and more. I also remember the “RFQ by fax” era, where it was widely suspected that the winner was often known in advance.

Kellysearch disappeared long ago (they even had a physical directory back in the day). County Industry is still around in a stripped-back form, but Google is a fickle gatekeeper and doesn’t send much traffic to directories anymore.

I won’t exactly miss Applegate, but it is a landmark from another time—and a sign of how search has shifted.

AI, sourcing, and what comes next

Applegate dabbled in AI toward the end, but I suspect Google’s changes and the rise of AI tools finished things off. Smarter sourcing is now possible on demand. As a quick example, I asked an AI assistant for wire-erosion (EDM) subcontractors in the South-East and got a perfectly usable starting list:

• Travelling Wire Ltd — Burgess Hill, West Sussex

• Southern EDM Ltd — West Sussex

• Newnham Engineering — Lancing, West Sussex

• Precision EDM Services — Ringwood, Hampshire

• Premier Precision Tooling Ltd — Waterlooville, Hampshire

• Cobra Tool & Die Ltd — Portsmouth, Hampshire

• Simplefit Ltd — Marchwood (Southampton), Hampshire

• Cadmatic Engineering Services — Newbury, Berkshire

• Epal Engineering — Storrington, West Sussex

• FT Gearing Systems — Aldershot, Hampshire

That’s essentially what County Industry has always done—simple, clean discovery—but now you can shape the prompt to fit exactly what you need, then click through and vet suppliers yourself.

A last word

I don’t have much more to add. Applegate deserves a nod as part of web history. What’s more interesting is what’s left and where we stand with search. I still think there’s room for very focused, truly useful directories—lightweight listings with verified details, not bloated content farms—especially for individual salespeople and buyers building their own shortlists.

Somewhere on my drive I still have a huge collection of old directory URLs from back in the day. Digital archaeology, I suppose.