We establish new Bombieri-Vinogradov type estimates for a wide class of multiplicative arithmetic functions and derive several applications, including: a new proof of a recent estimate by Drappeau and Topacogullari for arithmetical correlations; a theorem of Erdős-Wintner type with support equal to the level set of an additive function at shifted argument; and a law of iterated logarithm for the distribution of prime factors of integers weighted by τ (n − 1) where τ denotes the divisor function.