Intent data is information that suggests a company has started looking to buy a certain kind of product. It is built from signals across the web, such as what people at the company read, which review pages they visit and which jobs the company advertises. It tries to answer the question that a B2B contact database cannot: which of these companies is ready to buy now?
Companies rarely announce that they are shopping for software. But the people who will choose leave traces while they research. A team of five may read twenty articles about expense software in two weeks, compare three products on a software review platform and visit one vendor's pricing page. Each of these is a weak signal on its own. Together they form a pattern. The industry calls a sudden rise in such signals a surge.
There are three main sources. The first is the vendor's own website. The internet address of a visitor can often be matched to the company it belongs to. The second is publishers. A network of niche news sites for IT, finance or HR records which topics readers from each company are reading. Some digital publishing companies sell this data as a product of its own. The third is public data, such as job postings and news about funding or new leaders.
Most intent data is about companies, not about named people. The signals are grouped by company, so the vendor learns that "someone at this company" is researching a topic. AI models then compare the pattern with the history of past deals. They predict which accounts are in a buying cycle, the months a company spends deciding what to buy, and at which stage.
Consider a Coimbatore company that sells expense-management software to mid-sized companies in the United States. Over 14 days, people at a manufacturer in Ohio read 23 articles about expense software. They compare products on two review sites, and visit the Coimbatore company's own pricing page twice. The same manufacturer has just advertised for an accounts payable manager. The intent score for this account rises from 20 to 85 out of 100. The account moves to the top of the sales team's list in the CRM. That week, an AI SDR writes to the manufacturer's finance head.
Intent data is sold mainly to companies that sell in the United States. Its accuracy is often questioned, because a burst of reading can come from a student, a consultant or a competitor. So sales teams use it to decide whom to call first, not to replace their own judgement. Collecting it also raises questions under data protection laws, such as Europe's GDPR.