What Is Intent Data? Definition, Types and Examples
A plain definition of intent data, the difference between account-level and person-level signals, four ways it misleads small teams, and a one-minute rule for which kind to use.
Intent data is recorded behaviour that shows a company or a person is actively researching a purchase, collected so a seller can reach them while the decision is still open. A visit to a pricing page, a question in a Reddit thread, a comment under a competitor's LinkedIn post: each is one data point, and the collection of them is intent data. The short answer to "what is intent data" is therefore evidence of timing. It tells you who is looking now, which a contact list never does.
Why does intent data matter?
Buyers do most of their research without talking to a salesperson, so the only way to know who is in-market is to watch what they do. In a Gartner survey of 646 B2B buyers run between August and September 2025, 67% said they prefer a rep-free buying experience and 45% said they used AI during a recent purchase (Gartner press release, 9 March 2026). If two thirds of buyers would rather not hear from you until they are ready, the question becomes how you know when that moment arrives.
A labelled example. Suppose a ten-person agency sells HubSpot implementation. A cold list of 500 marketing directors tells them nothing about timing, so most emails land on people who are happy with what they have. Intent data narrows the same list to the twelve directors who, this week, commented "we're switching CRMs in Q1" under a post, asked r/marketing which CRM to pick, or followed a competitor's company page. The message to those twelve can mention the thing they just said. The other 488 can wait.
What are the types of intent data?
Every explainer splits intent data by who collected it. That split matters, but a second split, who the data identifies, matters more for a small team.
First-party intent data is behaviour you record on properties you own: pricing-page visits, demo requests, email clicks, trial activity, support questions. It is accurate and free, and it only covers people who have already found you.
Third-party intent data is behaviour recorded somewhere else and sold or licensed to you. On its own page, Bombora describes three sources: a data cooperative that pools reading behaviour from member publishers, publisher-direct feeds from one site or a niche group of sites, and bidstream data passed during advertising auctions. Providers group that behaviour into topics and flag when a company's reading on a topic rises above its normal level.
Now the second axis.
Account-level intent data says a company is researching a topic. It does not say which person. Someone at a 2,000-person firm read eight articles about CRM migration; the data cannot tell you whether it was the CMO or an intern writing a term paper.
Person-level intent data says a named human did a visible thing in public: posted, commented, asked, followed, liked. You know who, you know what they said, and you can usually reach them where they said it. This is the kind a founder or a two-person sales team can act on without a research analyst.
Where does intent data come from?
Use this table as a checklist when you decide which sources to watch or buy.
| Source | What you see | Who it identifies | Cost to a small team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your website and product | Pricing views, trial signups, feature use | Known leads and customers only | Free, already in your analytics |
| Search engines | Keyword volumes, your own search console queries | Nobody by name | Free, but anonymous |
| Review and comparison sites | Which products a company compared | The account, sometimes the person | Paid, usually an annual contract |
| Publisher co-ops and bidstream | A company's reading rising on a topic | The account only | Paid, priced for enterprise ABM |
| Comments, likes, posts, new followers of a competitor page | The person, with title and company | Free to watch by hand, slow | |
| Reddit and X | Questions, complaints, "what should I use for" posts | The person, often anonymous on Reddit | Free to search, slow by hand |
Two rows reward attention from a company of one to 200 people: LinkedIn, and Reddit with X. They are person-level, public, and free to read. The cost is time.
Intent data vs buying signals
The two terms get used as synonyms, and they are not. A buying signal is one event. Intent data is the collection of those events, stored and scored so you can rank people by how close they are to a decision.
| Buying signal | Intent data | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | One observed event ("asked for CRM recommendations on Reddit today") | Many events, over time, per person or account |
| Granularity | A moment | A trend or a score |
| How you get it | Notice it, or get an alert | Collect and store signals, then rank |
| How you act | Reply to that one thing | Decide who gets outreach this week and in what order |
| Can be wrong? | Rarely, you can read it yourself | Often, if the scoring treats weak events as strong ones |
A practical rule: write your outreach from the signal, decide your priorities from the data. The signal gives you the sentence; the data tells you whom to send it to first.
What does intent data get wrong?
Four failure modes cost small teams the most.
It flags the account, not the buyer. Account-level data tells you a company is interested. You still have to guess the person, and guessing wrong turns a warm account into another cold email.
It confuses curiosity with budget. Reading three articles is not a purchase decision. A competitor's employee doing research, a student, or a journalist all produce the same data as a buyer. Treat a single event as a reason to look, not as a reason to pitch.
It arrives late. Co-op and bidstream data is aggregated and delivered on a schedule. A public comment, by contrast, is visible the minute it is posted. The faster the source, the smaller the window a competitor has to get there first.
It raises consent questions. First-party data is covered by your own privacy policy. Third-party data depends on the collector's consent chain, which you cannot audit. Public posts are the clearest case: the person chose to say it where anyone could read it, and your reply is a reply, not surveillance. Keep a record of where each signal came from so you can answer the question if a prospect asks.
How to use intent data this week
Three actions, in order. Each takes under an hour the first time.
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Write down your five strongest signals. Not every event is worth chasing. Pick the behaviours that, in your experience, precede a deal: a complaint about a competitor, a "what tool should I use" question, a new hire into the buying role, a follow of a competitor's page, a comment on a post about your category. The free Buying Signal Playbook lists twelve signals worth chasing and eight to ignore, with the LinkedIn triggers and Reddit and X queries for each, if you want a starting list.
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Watch two sources by hand for one week. Pick one competitor's LinkedIn page and one subreddit where your buyers complain. Each morning, read the new comments and posts and note who matches your ideal customer. By Friday you will have a short list and a feel for which signals are real. If the manual watching eats the week, Intentsly's LinkedIn signals and Reddit and X signals do the same monitoring continuously and score each person against your customer profile, so the list is waiting for you instead of the other way round.
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Reply to the signal, not with a pitch. Open with the thing they said. A person who asked which CRM to pick wants an answer, and the seller who gives a useful one earns the follow-up. Our own launch campaign worked this way: we ran our own signals on LinkedIn, targeted founders complaining about cold-outreach burnout, and booked 14 qualified demos in 14 days with no manual outreach. The signal supplied the opening line every time.
The decision rule, if you want one sentence to carry away: if you sell to a defined list of large accounts with an ABM team behind you, buy account-level third-party data; if you are a founder, an agency or a team under twenty people, start with person-level public signals, because they name the human and cost nothing to verify.
Related lessons
This is the first lesson in the fundamentals series. The Learn index lists each new lesson as it is published, including the ones on buying signals, ideal customer profiles and lead scoring that this page refers to. For the hands-on version of the Reddit row in the source table, read how to find B2B leads on Reddit, which gives the exact search queries and a scoring rule.
If you want to see what person-level intent data looks like for your own market before building any of this, the Buying Signal Playbook is the free place to start: twelve signals, the queries to find them, and what to say when you do.
FAQ
What is intent data in B2B sales?
In B2B sales, intent data is the recorded research behaviour of companies and the people inside them: pages visited, topics read, questions asked in public, competitor pages followed. Sellers use it to decide who to contact first and what to say, because the behaviour shows both timing and the problem the buyer is trying to solve.
What is the difference between first-party and third-party intent data?
First-party intent data is behaviour you record on your own website, product and email, so it is accurate but limited to people who already know you. Third-party intent data is behaviour collected elsewhere, such as on publisher networks or review sites, and sold to you. It reaches people who have never heard of you, at the cost of less certainty about who exactly acted.
Is intent data accurate?
It is accurate about the behaviour and uncertain about the meaning. The data correctly records that someone read an article or left a comment; whether that person has budget and authority is an inference. Person-level public signals are easier to check because you can read the post yourself. Account-level topic data needs a second signal before it is worth outreach.
Is using intent data legal?
Using your own first-party data is governed by your privacy policy and the consent your visitors gave. Third-party data depends on the provider's consent chain, which you should ask about before buying. Replying to a public post on LinkedIn or Reddit is ordinary participation on a public platform. In every case, record the source of each signal so you can explain it if asked.
