Find Companies Using Amazon CloudFront (API Guide)

Amazon CloudFront is one of the most widely deployed content delivery networks on the web. It is the CDN bundled into the broader AWS ecosystem, so any team already running on S3, EC2, or an Application Load Balancer can put CloudFront in front of their origin in a few clicks. That ubiquity is exactly what makes “uses CloudFront” a useful technographic signal: it is a reliable proxy for a company that has committed to Amazon’s infrastructure stack.

This guide explains what CloudFront usage tells you about a company, the exact header, DNS, and TLS signals that reveal it, and how to turn a raw domain list into a CloudFront-confirmed lead list with the DetectZeStack API—starting with a single curl command you can run right now.

Why Find Companies Using Amazon CloudFront?

Technographic data—what technology a company runs—is frequently a stronger qualifier than firmographics alone. A confirmed CloudFront detection is a specific window into a company’s infrastructure decisions:

• It signals an AWS commitment. CloudFront is rarely adopted in isolation. A team running their CDN on CloudFront has almost always standardized on AWS for the rest of their stack—compute, storage, and networking. If you sell anything that plugs into AWS, complements it, or competes with a piece of it, that is a strong qualifier.
• It maps the buyer. Infrastructure CDN choices are made by platform and DevOps teams, not marketers. Knowing a company runs CloudFront tells you which department owns the decision and which technical pains are likely to land—cost optimization, cache configuration, edge logic, WAF.
• It establishes scale and maturity. Putting a CDN in front of an origin is a deliberate performance and reliability decision. Companies that have done it are generally past the hobby stage and serious about uptime and global latency—a useful filter when you want operators rather than experiments.

The same pipeline applies to any detectable technology. We have companion guides for finding companies using Node.js and finding companies using Nginx—the filter changes, the workflow stays the same.

How CloudFront Detection Works (Headers, DNS, TLS)

CloudFront is an infrastructure CDN: it sits in front of a site’s origin and proxies its traffic, the same role Cloudflare and Fastly play. That means—unlike a library-delivery CDN such as jsDelivr, which only appears as a script reference in the page body—CloudFront leaves marks across the request path itself: in the response headers, in DNS, and in the TLS certificate. Each layer is independent, so a site that hides one often still gives away another.

The Signals That Reveal CloudFront

Here are the three signal layers and what each one looks like in practice:

The HTTP headers are the most reliable signal because CloudFront adds them to every response and they are hard to confuse with anything else. You can see them yourself with a single curl -I:

$ curl -sI https://example.com | grep -iE "x-amz-cf|x-cache|via"
X-Amz-Cf-Pop: IAD89-P3
X-Amz-Cf-Id: dQw4w9WgXcQ-aBcDeFgHiJkLmNoPqRsTuVwXyZ==
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 a1b2c3d4e5f6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)

The DNS layer is the second signal. When a company points a custom domain at a CloudFront distribution, the domain CNAMEs to a hostname ending in cloudfront.net:

$ dig www.example.com CNAME +short
d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net.

The TLS certificate is the third signal. CloudFront distributions that use an AWS Certificate Manager certificate present an edge certificate issued by Amazon, which you can read straight off the handshake with openssl. It is the weakest of the three on its own—plenty of non-CloudFront AWS services also use Amazon-issued certificates—but it is a useful confirmation layer when headers are stripped and DNS is masked. This is the same multi-layer approach covered in how to detect a website’s CDN and hosting provider.

Detect Amazon CloudFront on a Single Site

You can try detection right now against the public demo endpoint—no API key required. The demo is IP-rate-limited, so use it for spot checks rather than bulk scans:

$ curl -s "https://detectzestack.com/demo?url=example.com" \
  | jq '.technologies[] | select(.name == "Amazon CloudFront")'
{
  "name": "Amazon CloudFront",
  "categories": ["CDN"],
  "confidence": 100,
  "description": "Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network operated by Amazon Web Services.",
  "website": "https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/",
  "icon": "CloudFront.svg",
  "source": "http",
  "version": "",
  "cpe": ""
}

Amazon CloudFront is matched off the X-Amz-Cf-Id / X-Amz-Cf-Pop response headers and categorized under CDN. The entry above carries source: "http" because the evidence came from the HTTP response headers, which is the strongest signal. When the header is absent but the domain CNAMEs to cloudfront.net, the same technology comes back with source: "dns" at a lower confidence instead—DNS evidence is reliable but slightly weaker than a live header match.

When you want the full stack for a domain rather than a filtered slice, call /analyze with your API key. The complete response is shaped like this:

$ curl -s "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/analyze?url=example.com" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com"
{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "domain": "example.com",
  "technologies": [
    {
      "name": "Amazon CloudFront",
      "categories": ["CDN"],
      "confidence": 100,
      "description": "Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network operated by Amazon Web Services.",
      "website": "https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/",
      "icon": "CloudFront.svg",
      "source": "http",
      "version": "",
      "cpe": ""
    },
    {
      "name": "Amazon S3",
      "categories": ["CDN"],
      "confidence": 100,
      "description": "Amazon S3 is cloud object storage from Amazon Web Services.",
      "website": "https://aws.amazon.com/s3/",
      "icon": "Amazon S3.svg",
      "source": "http",
      "version": "",
      "cpe": ""
    }
  ],
  "categories": {
    "CDN": ["Amazon CloudFront", "Amazon S3"]
  },
  "meta": { "status_code": 200, "tech_count": 2, "scan_depth": "full" },
  "cached": false,
  "response_ms": 1842
}

The top-level categories map groups every detection so you can pull all CDNs with .categories["CDN"] without iterating the array. The meta object carries the HTTP status_code, the tech_count, and the scan_depth; response_ms and cached sit at the top level, not inside meta.

One field to watch for list building is meta.scan_depth. A value of "full" means the HTTP fetch succeeded and header detection ran. A value of "partial" means the site blocked or timed out the HTTP request and only the DNS and TLS layers completed. Because CloudFront is also detectable from the cloudfront.net CNAME, a "partial" scan can still confirm it—but an absent CloudFront entry on a "partial" scan is an unknown, not a no. Those domains belong in a retry queue.

Find Companies Using Amazon CloudFront at Scale (API Example)

Running curl -I and dig by hand works for one-off checks, but it does not scale to thousands of domains. For list building, POST /analyze/batch accepts up to 10 URLs per request and analyzes them concurrently. Each entry in the response carries either a full analysis result or an error for domains that could not be fetched:

$ curl -s -X POST "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/analyze/batch" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["example.com", "aws.amazon.com", "disneyplus.com"]}'

The response wraps one result object per URL, each with the same shape as a single /analyze response:

{
  "results": [
    { "url": "example.com",     "result": { "...full analysis..." : "" } },
    { "url": "aws.amazon.com",   "result": { "...full analysis..." : "" } },
    { "url": "disneyplus.com",   "result": { "...full analysis..." : "" } }
  ],
  "total_ms": 2341,
  "successful": 3,
  "failed": 0
}

Batch Scanning Your Prospect List

Because each result matches the single-domain shape, the filtering logic is identical whether you scan one domain or a thousand. Here is a complete, copy-pasteable pipeline using nothing but bash, curl, and jq. It reads domains.txt (one domain per line), sends batches of 10 to /analyze/batch, and appends every domain where Amazon CloudFront is detected to cloudfront_leads.csv, recording the tech count alongside it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# find-cloudfront.sh — filter a domain list down to CloudFront-confirmed leads
KEY="YOUR_KEY"
HOST="detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com"

echo "domain,tech_count" > cloudfront_leads.csv

# Process domains.txt in batches of 10 (the /analyze/batch maximum)
xargs -n 10 < domains.txt | while read -r batch; do
  urls=$(printf '%s\n' $batch | jq -R . | jq -s '{urls: .}')
  curl -s -X POST "https://$HOST/analyze/batch" \
    -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: $KEY" \
    -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: $HOST" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "$urls" |
  jq -r '.results[]
    | select(.result != null)
    | .result as $r
    | select([$r.technologies[].name] | index("Amazon CloudFront"))
    | [$r.domain, ($r.meta.tech_count | tostring)]
    | @csv' >> cloudfront_leads.csv
done

wc -l cloudfront_leads.csv

A 1,000-domain list becomes 100 batch calls. The index("Amazon CloudFront") guard keeps a domain whenever CloudFront appears in its technology list, and select(.result != null) skips domains that failed to resolve (those come back with an error field instead of a result). For a deeper treatment of batch throughput, retries, and a production Python scanner, see how to batch scan 1,000 websites.

Turning CloudFront Detection Into a Prospect List

A CloudFront-confirmed list is rarely the end goal on its own—it is the entry point to a more specific segment. Two enrichment moves make it sharper:

• Cross-reference the origin. CloudFront tells you the CDN; the rest of the technologies array tells you what sits behind it. A site that returns Amazon CloudFront alongside Amazon S3 or an ELB header is fully committed to AWS. One that pairs CloudFront with a non-AWS origin is a different conversation. Splitting your list on that distinction turns a broad “uses CloudFront” segment into “all-in on AWS” versus “CloudFront in front of something else.”
• Score by meta.tech_count. The tech count is a rough proxy for how built-out a company’s stack is. A CloudFront site with a deep technology fingerprint is generally a more mature operation than one with a thin stack—useful for prioritizing outreach.

Three common ways teams put the finished list to work:

• Sales and prospecting. If you sell CDN tooling, edge compute, cost-optimization, observability, or a security product that integrates with AWS, a CloudFront list is a precise audience. The detection narrows the market to companies whose stack your product actually fits. The same approach drives the Stripe technographic prospecting playbook—swap the technology, keep the method.
• Competitive intelligence. Scanning a market segment for CDN choice tells you how an entire space builds. A cohort heavy on CloudFront is making different infrastructure bets than one on Cloudflare or Fastly—useful context when you study how a market makes platform decisions.
• Security and attack-surface mapping. Security teams inventory which CDNs and clouds a domain depends on as part of third-party-risk and attack-surface reviews. The CDN category is exactly the layer they need to enumerate, and CloudFront sites frequently pair with a Cloudflare or AWS WAF worth noting—see how to detect Cloudflare Bot Management for the related bot-defense signal.

Feeding these signals into a scoring model is covered in our lead enrichment pipeline guide.

Get Your DetectZeStack API Key

The free tier includes 100 requests per month with no credit card—enough to validate the pipeline on a sample of your prospect list before scaling up. Sign-up is instant through RapidAPI:

1. Get a key at rapidapi.com/mlugoapx/api/detectzestack.
2. Spot-check a domain you know: curl -s "https://detectzestack.com/demo?url=yourdomain.com" | jq '.technologies[].name'
3. Run the batch script above against your first 100 domains.

Conclusion

Finding companies using Amazon CloudFront comes down to reading three layers well: the X-Amz-Cf-Id and X-Amz-Cf-Pop response headers, the cloudfront.net DNS CNAME, and the Amazon-issued edge certificate. Because CloudFront is an infrastructure CDN, the headers are the strongest signal and DNS is the reliable backup when headers are stripped. A single /analyze call answers the one-domain question; /analyze/batch turns a raw domain list into a CloudFront-confirmed lead list; and meta.scan_depth tells you which negatives are real and which are unknowns worth a retry. Swap the jq filter and the same pipeline segments by any other CDN, cloud, or backend technology instead.