Intent data

Intent data tries to answer "who is looking now?" rather than "who could buy?". It comes in three broad kinds. First-party intent is what you see yourself: visits to your pricing page, replies, sign-ups. Third-party intent is collected by data providers from networks of publisher sites and review platforms, and reports that people at a company have been reading more than usual about a topic.

Third-party intent is aggregated and probabilistic: it shows that a company's traffic on a topic went up, not who read what or why. It works best as a way to order a list you already trust, deciding which ICP accounts to research first, not as a reason on its own to contact someone. An email that says "I saw you were researching X" usually reads as surveillance; a message about the underlying need does not.