A total addressable market is often explained as a revenue number. For outbound, the number that matters is the list behind it: the companies that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), counted and ready to qualify. If your ICP companies are on LinkedIn, you can build that list for free on AI Ark’s free plan, in two ways.
What is a TAM list?
A TAM list is the set of real companies that could buy from you, not a revenue estimate. It starts from your ICP: where your buyers are, how big they are, and what they do. Everything you send later, from cold email to call lists, is only as good as this list.
Can you build a TAM list for free?
Yes, at least to map and size it. Ali recorded the whole demo on AI Ark’s free plan. As of November 2026, the free plan costs $0, comes with 100 credits a month, and lets you select up to 25 records at a time. Lookalike search and the filters below all work on it. Exporting a full list of thousands of companies is where a paid plan comes in (from $49 a month, up to 10,000 records at a time).
To start, sign in to AI Ark with a Google account. Then pick one of the two routes below.
Route 1: start from lookalikes of your best customers
If you already have customers, start here: it’s the fastest way to a TAM that looks like the accounts you’ve already won.
- Open the company lookalike search.
- Enter up to 5 of your existing customers.
- Click search. In the demo, 5 customers returned 29,000 lookalike companies worldwide, each with a lookalike relevance score.
- Set the location to your primary market. In the demo, the United States narrowed it to 8,300 companies.
Route 2: build it with filters
If you’re starting from scratch, filter by your primary market and company size first, then use keywords instead of industry.
- Set the location to your primary market.
- Set the employee size of the companies you go after.
- Skip the industry filter. Industry is self-reported on LinkedIn: a company picks the closest option from a short list when it creates its page, so the label is often wrong.
- Add keywords instead, and choose where they should appear in the source settings: the company description, industry, company name, SEO description or products and services.
Not sure which keywords to use? Open a company you know is a good fit, read its company overview and its products and services, and borrow the words it uses to describe itself.
Narrow it with department filters
Department filters let you target companies by the team you sell to, and by how fast that team is growing. The employees-by-department filter counts the people each company has in a given team.
In the demo, Ali used our own ICP as the example. Cold email only works for a company that has at least one salesperson to close the replies, so he filtered for companies with someone in sales. Then, for a product that helps sales teams, he kept only companies whose sales team grew by 10% in the last 12 months.
| Filter in the demo | Companies |
|---|---|
| Lookalikes of 5 customers, worldwide | 29,000 |
| Lookalikes of 5 customers, United States | 8,300 |
| At least one person in sales | 1.5 million |
| Sales team grew 10% in 12 months | 116,000 |
Qualify the list with Claude Code or Codex
A filtered count is a starting point, not your exact TAM. Export the companies, then give the list to an AI agent such as Claude Code or Codex along with your qualifying criteria, and let it check each company against them. What’s left is the TAM you can actually sell to.
How big does your TAM need to be for cold email?
We look for at least 30,000 prospects in your primary market. Below that, there usually aren’t enough of the right accounts to test messaging and keep a campaign running, and an agentic GTM system, starting with call-ready leads for your SDRs, may be the better fit. If your TAM clears 30,000 and your offer hasn’t been tested through cold email yet, we can run a free campaign for you for an entire week: apply for it below, or see how we run cold email.
Once you know how many companies you’re going after, the Inbox Calculator shows how many inboxes and domains it takes to reach them.
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Questions
What is a TAM list?
A TAM list is the actual list of companies that fit your ideal customer profile and could buy from you. Market-sizing guides give your total addressable market as a revenue figure; a TAM list gives you the companies behind that figure, so you can count them, qualify them and reach out to them.
Is AI Ark free?
Yes. As of November 2026, AI Ark has a free plan at $0 a month with 100 credits, unused credits rolling over, and up to 25 records selected at a time. The lookalike company search used in the video works on the free plan. Paid plans start at $49 a month.
How many companies can you export on AI Ark's free plan?
The free plan lets you select up to 25 records at a time, within 100 credits a month. That is enough to size your market and test a sample, but exporting a whole TAM of thousands of companies needs a paid plan; the $49 plan selects up to 10,000 records at a time (November 2026).
Why not use the LinkedIn industry filter to build a TAM list?
Because industry is self-reported. When a company creates its LinkedIn page, it picks from a short list of options and chooses the closest one, which is often inaccurate. Filtering on keywords in the company description, SEO description and products and services finds the companies that actually do what you're looking for.
How big does a TAM need to be for cold email?
We look for a total addressable market of at least 30,000 prospects in your primary market. Below that, there usually aren't enough of the right accounts to test messaging and keep a campaign running.
Read the video transcript
If a list of your ICP companies is on LinkedIn and you want to map your total addressable market for free, here's how you can do it. To start, all you got to do is head over to ai-ark.com and click on login. You can simply sign in or sign up using a Google account. Now before we get started, I just wanted to share that this is a free plan that I'm doing this demo on. So you can definitely map your total addressable market for free. Now you can map your total addressable market in two different ways. You can either start by building a company lookalike list of your existing customers, or you can simply just carry on with the filters. If you have customers, I would recommend you to start by building a company lookalike list. Simply click over here and enter the name of the company of your existing customer.
AI Ark lets you enter a maximum of five companies that you want to build a look-alike list of. Once you're done doing that, click on search. There are 29,000 companies that are look-alikes of these companies globally. AI Ark also gives you a lookalike relevance score. Now this number is global. If you want to know the total number of companies in your primary market, let's just say it's the United States. We just head over to location and enter United States. And there you have it, 8,300 companies that are lookalikes of these companies in your primary market that's the United States in this example.
If you're building it with filters instead, start by selecting your primary market and then the employee size of the companies that you would like to go after. Now what a lot of people would do next to map their total addressable market is to select simply the industry of their ideal customer profile. The problem is industry is self reported. So if you're creating a company page on LinkedIn, you're presented with a very limited amount of options to select from. So people select the closest one possible, but that's not very accurate to bypass this problem. You can simply build a list off of keywords. And if you go to source settings, you can select where these keywords might appear. So they might appear in the company's description, in the industry company name, SEO description, and products and services. If you don't know the exact product and services keywords or the other keywords, you can simply just head over to a company that you might think is a fit. You can click on these links over here and all you got to do is click on your description and show more for company overview and you can just find the keywords here for your ideal company. The same goes for product and services as well. You simply just got to find that column and you can just hover over it. Another way to build your list is to use the specific filter employees by department. So for cold emails to actually work, you need to have at least one salesperson in your company. So if I select the specific filter.
Now I know that there are 1.5 million companies that fit that criteria. Let's say you sell a product or service that is beneficial to a sales team and you just want to target companies that have grown their sales team in a course of 12 months by 10%. You can also do that. Let me just show that to you as well. There you go. So there are 116,000 companies that fit that criteria. Now that you know that you can actually do this for free, I would recommend you to head over to ai-ark.com and map your total addressable market.
Also bear in mind that this should not be your exact total addressable market. You would still need to export all of these companies, feed it over to Codex or Claude Code and ask it to further qualify as per your criteria. If you map your total addressable market and it's more than 30,000 prospects in your primary market, and if you'd like to test your offers by a cold email, we can run a free campaign for you for an entire week. Link for the same is in the comments.
Lightly edited for clarity.