Glossary · Signal

What is buyer intent?

Buyer intent is a judgement about how close the author of a message is to making a purchase — whether they are describing a problem, asking for a recommendation, comparing named products, or leaving a supplier — expressed as a label or a score.

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[01] THE LONGER ANSWER/ SIGNAL

Why buyer intent matters

The useful insight behind the term is that the highest-value public conversations usually contain no brand name at all. "Is there anything that handles a shared inbox without a full helpdesk" is worth far more than a post naming your company, because the author has a problem, has not chosen a solution, and is asking in public. Brand keywords find people who already know you exist. Intent finds them earlier, when the decision is still open — which is also why intent keywords are less contested, since most companies are only watching their own name.
[02] HOW IT WORKS/ IN PRACTICE

Intent is a category, not a number

The practical form is a small set of labels — describing a problem, seeking a recommendation, comparing tools, reporting a bug, leaving a competitor, passing mention. Each carries a different action, and the label is what makes routing possible.

Language is the signal

Questions outrank statements. First person outranks third. Present tense outranks past. "We are evaluating" beats "we use", and "we moved off" beats both if you sell against the thing they left.

It combines with reach and recency

High intent on a two-week-old thread is usually worthless — the author has decided. High intent in a thread with no readers is worth less than the same words in an active one. A single score blends intent with recency and audience for this reason.

Negative sentiment on a competitor keyword

The cleanest signal in the category, and the easiest to configure. Somebody unhappy with the incumbent has already done the expensive part of the decision, which is deciding to change.
[03] WHAT IT IS NOT/ CONFUSED WITH

Buyer intent against the terms it gets mixed up with

Most of the confusion in this category is vocabulary rather than substance. These are the terms buyer intent is most often used interchangeably with, and the difference that actually matters in each case.

Sentiment

Sentiment is how the author feels; intent is what they are about to do. They come apart constantly — an angry post about a competitor is negative sentiment and excellent intent, and a delighted post about your product is positive sentiment and no intent at all.

Intent data (the B2B kind)

In martech, "intent data" usually means anonymised browsing behaviour bought from a data provider — which accounts visited which topic pages. That is inferred from clicks and sold in aggregate. Public buyer intent is somebody saying it in words, attributable to a post you can read.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring ranks people already in your CRM by fit and behaviour. Intent scoring ranks public messages from people who are not in your CRM and may never fill in a form.

[04] WHERE IT MISLEADS/ THE CAVEAT

What a definition will not tell you

Intent scoring is a judgement made from a few sentences, and it will be confidently wrong sometimes — sarcasm, hypotheticals and people describing a problem they have already solved all read as high intent. This is why a score you cannot interrogate is worse than no score: without a stated reason you cannot tell a good 90 from a bad one, and the first bad one you act on teaches you to distrust all of them.

What FishOut does about it

FishOut does not put a number on intent. It labels what each post is doing — Asking for recommendations, Comparison, Has a problem, Complaint and five more — and shows Why chips such as Asking for help and Not answered yet beside its relevance. The built-in Leads view collects the shopping labels on your topic and competitor keywords, and Switchers collects complaints and negative posts about competitors. An agent you write can route on any label, so a buying signal and a bug go to different people.

Questions

Read next

Sentiment analysisRelevance and labelsMonitoring Reddit for buyer intent

Other terms

Social listeningShare of voiceBrand monitoringSentiment analysisMCP (Model Context Protocol)Generative engine optimisation (GEO)Webhook