Intent data, ranked for teams that need pipeline this quarter

In the pipeline meeting, marketing puts up a list of surging accounts and the SDR manager asks who at those companies will take a meeting this month. Marketing has no answer. The list measures topic research somewhere inside a company, and the reps need a name and a reason to call.

Intent signals sit at different distances from a purchase. The right buy depends on that distance and on how fast your team turns a signal into a conversation.

Four kinds of intent, by distance to a deal

Third-party research intent sits farthest out. Bombora tracks research on more than 25,300 topics across a co-op of publishers and B2B sites, and flags a surge when an account’s last three weeks of activity outrun its 12-week baseline. ZoomInfo says its intent engine draws on 210 million IP-to-organization pairings and more than 6 trillion new keyword-to-device pairings, sourced monthly from U.S. devices.

First-party website intent starts on your own pages, which means the buyer has already found you. Reverse-IP lookup names the company, as ZoomInfo’s WebSights does, and person-level tools such as RB2B, Warmly and Vector try to name the visitor. HubSpot scores intent on visits to pages you pick, among other criteria, and bills it in credits.

For product-led companies, community and product signals sit closer still: the buyer is already using something you built. Person360, from Zoom-owned Common Room, stitches website visits, product usage, community activity and CRM records into profiles of named people.

Review-site intent sits closest to a purchase for software sellers. G2 Buyer Intent tracks product and category page views, competitor comparisons, pricing-page engagement and review activity, and G2’s pitch for it cites buyer research across G2 and the three review sites it bought from Gartner in February: Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp. TrustRadius, which HG Insights bought in June 2025, pairs its buyer intent data with HG’s technology-usage and spend data.

The homework buyers do in ChatGPT

Part of the research these tools watch for now happens inside AI assistants. Demandbase counted about 2.6 million ChatGPT-referred visits to the B2B websites it tracks in June 2026, up from roughly 645,000 a year earlier.

AI assistants are becoming an increasingly important way B2B buyers discover and evaluate companies, but much of that activity happens before a buyer ever reaches a brand’s website.

When that buyer finally lands on your pricing page, assume a shortlist already exists. Weight late-stage signals such as pricing-page visits and competitor comparisons well above topic research when you decide which accounts an SDR works first.

How we ranked

We ranked eight sources on six criteria: distance from a purchase, whether an SDR can act on the signal (account or named person), provenance and consent, cost to test, privacy exposure and momentum. The desk read vendor documentation, pricing pages, press releases, analyst results the vendors published and regulator guidance, with prices as listed in early October 2026. RAC did not test these products hands-on.

1. 1G2 Buyer IntentThe closest signal to a purchase for software sellers: accounts viewing your product and category pages, comparing you with competitors, checking pricing and reading or writing reviews.Best for: B2B software companies whose buyers shortlist on review sites, and SDR teams that need a reason to call this week.Watch out for: account-level signals that leave the person to your reps, and category fit, because if your buyers skip G2 you pay for silence. G2 publishes no price for Buyer Intent; before you sign, ask which of its review sites feed your signals.
2. 26senseForrester rated it among the most complete platforms in its Q1 2026 Wave for B2B revenue marketing, with the highest possible score on data, and its MCP server puts keyword-level intent and predictive buying stages inside Claude, ChatGPT, Writer and Agentforce.Best for: enterprise marketing and SDR teams with the RevOps capacity to run predictive models and orchestration.Watch out for: opaque cost. 6sense publishes no prices and meters contact exports with data credits, so get the credit math in writing and ask how the predictive stages are scored before you route reps on them.
3. 3Common Room by ZoomThe strongest first-party engine here, stitching website visits, product usage, community activity and CRM records into profiles of named people, with its entry price published.Best for: product-led and developer-focused companies whose buyers show up in the product or community before they fill out a form.Watch out for: entry cost and caps. Essential runs $2,500 a month billed annually ($30,000 a year), and website deanonymization stops at 1,000 a month below the Enterprise tier. Zoom bought Common Room in July and sells it on its own or alongside Zoom Revenue Accelerator, so ask how the acquisition affects pricing and the product roadmap before you sign.
4. 4BomboraThe wholesale layer of third-party research intent, with 25,300+ topics from a co-op in which 86% of the data is exclusive to Bombora, and the plumbing behind other products, from Warmly’s third-party signals to G2’s new ad audiences.Best for: account prioritization and paid media, bought direct or through a platform you already run.Watch out for: lag and abstraction. Company Surge scores an account’s topic research over the latest three weeks, and your SDR still has to find the person and the reason to call.
5. 5DemandbaseAn enterprise ABM platform that sells intent, including what it calls person-level intent, with advertising and account identification on one contract, plus Mojo, a campaign agent launched in September.Best for: enterprise marketing teams that want intent and ads from their ABM platform and will pay for all of it.Watch out for: all-in packaging. Demandbase charges a platform fee plus a flat fee per user and does not sell the platform in separate pieces, so expect a whole-platform quote even for a sales pilot.
6. 6ZoomInfoIntent that names the people inside accounts researching your category, plus WebSights visitor ID, on top of 500 million-plus contacts by ZoomInfo’s count, and worth switching on if you already pay for ZoomInfo.Best for: SDR teams already on ZoomInfo that want intent and website visitors without adding a vendor.Watch out for: topic caps and geography. Marketing Demand includes 25 intent topics, and ZoomInfo sources its intent from U.S. devices. Its 89% net revenue retention in Q2 means last year’s customers now pay it 11% less in total, which is your opening at renewal.
7. 7HubSpot intent, via Data AgentA cheap first step for HubSpot shops: watching a company for intent costs 10 HubSpot credits a month, or 10 cents at list price, and you set the intent criteria down to which pages count.Best for: HubSpot customers who want a low-cost first test inside the CRM their reps already use.Watch out for: custom signals at 50 credits per company, per signal, per month. One custom signal on 1,000 accounts runs $500 a month at list, so price the watch list before you build it.
8. 8RB2B, Warmly and Vector (person-level visitor ID)The fastest path from a website visit to a named person, with RB2B’s contact-level ID and business emails from $149 a month on its Pro plan, $10,000 a year at Warmly, which HubSpot agreed in June to buy, and $36,000 a year at Vector.Best for: U.S.-focused teams with heavy inbound traffic and an SDR who can work alerts the same day.Watch out for: coverage claims. RB2B’s homepage promises 70-80% of traffic identified, people and companies combined, while its pricing table lists contact-level coverage of 15-20% on the $149 Pro plan and 35-45% on the $199 Pro+ plan, U.S. traffic only. The $79 Starter plan sends LinkedIn URLs to Slack or Teams with no email addresses.

Where Clay fits

Clay sits outside the ranking because it routes signals more than it creates them. It sells data from more than 200 providers in one place, and its Growth plan, listed from $446 a month, is the tier that adds web intent signals. Use it to combine the sources above once one of them has passed your 60-day test.

Privacy exposure, by jurisdiction

RB2B built person-level identification as a U.S.-only product. It says GDPR does not apply to it, because its personal-data profiles are matched to U.S. home addresses and IP ringfencing limits resolution to U.S. traffic. Outside the U.S., RB2B identifies companies only, through a partnership with Demandbase.

France’s privacy regulator has already shown how it views scraped B2B contact data. In December 2024 the CNIL fined KASPR €240,000 over a Chrome extension that pulled contact details from LinkedIn profiles. It found no legal basis for collecting details of people who had limited their profile visibility, a five-year retention clock that restarted with each update, notices that began only in 2022 and only in English, and vague answers about where the data came from.

In the UK, ICO guidance last updated in April 2026 says the PECR consent rule applies whenever scripts and tags store or read information on a visitor’s device, unless an exemption fits. The ICO says the rule also covers device fingerprinting that stores or reads device information, and Vector says it uses device fingerprinting to map contacts’ IDs. Ask any vendor that fingerprints how its script handles UK visitors.

California added a clock. Since Aug. 1, data brokers must pull deletion requests from the state’s DROP platform at least once every 45 days, and each request a broker fails to honor can cost $200 a day. Ask whether your intent and identity vendors are registered brokers, and how quickly California opt-outs leave their files.

Your data, their pool

In July, HubSpot announced terms that would have shared customers’ enrichment data, including business contact details, with other customers from Aug. 4. It reversed the change four days later, after customers objected.

We made a mistake, and we’re reverting those changes completely.

Bombora’s co-op runs a version of that exchange in the open. Member sites install Bombora’s tag and contribute engagement data, and 86% of the co-op’s data goes to Bombora alone.

How to test intent data in 60 days

Buy the test on short terms. RB2B and Clay list monthly prices, and HubSpot sells credits in $10 packs. Warmly’s pricing page pitches quarterly billing as the way to try, at $4,875 a quarter for deanonymization. For 6sense, Demandbase and ZoomInfo, ask for a paid pilot priced against the annual contract.

1. Days 1-5: write the decision rule. Pick one outcome, such as meetings held per account worked, and one source, then write down the margin over the holdout that would justify the renewal price.
2. Days 6-10: split your target accounts into two matched groups. The test group gets signal-triggered plays and the holdout keeps your normal cadence; log each signal and its date on the account record.
3. Days 11-50: work flagged accounts within two business days and log the misses, including existing customers, competitors, job seekers and bot traffic.
4. Days 51-60: compare meetings and pipeline per account worked across the two groups. Renew only if the test group clears the margin you wrote down in week one.

Match the test to the vendor’s clock. Bombora compares the latest three weeks of research with a 12-week baseline, so ask each vendor for its scoring window and refresh cadence before day one.

Before your next intent contract renews, name the one signal you trust enough to send an SDR after within a day. If you cannot name one, run the 60-day test first.