What Is Intent Data?

Intent data is a record of online behavior that suggests a person or company is researching a topic, and so may be close to buying. It turns "who fits" into "who fits and is looking now".

Key takeaways

• Intent data is a behavior signal, not a contact record. It says an account read about a topic. It does not give you the person or the email.
• There are two kinds. First-party intent comes from your own site and product. Third-party intent comes from other sites, mostly through data co-ops.
• Account-level intent is a hint, not proof. Treat it as a way to order a list you already trust.
• LeadOcean has no intent feed. It does have filters that work as proxy signals, such as detected technology and funding year.

What it is

Intent data is behavioral signal, collected from web activity, that shows which accounts or people are actively researching a topic, used to rank who to contact first.

The signal is a topic plus a company plus a time. "Acme read six articles on data enrichment this week" is intent data. "Acme has 400 employees" is firmographic data, and it does not change with behavior.

Intent is usually reported at account level. A vendor can see that traffic from a company's network or its staff is rising on a topic. It cannot always say which person did the reading.

How it works

Intent providers collect page views and content engagement, match them to companies, and score the change against a baseline. A spike over normal levels becomes a "surging" topic for that account.

1. A provider gathers activity from a set of sites. Bombora, for one, describes a data co-op of publishers and B2B brands that share research behavior (Bombora, September 2026).
2. Visits are matched to a company, usually by network address or a logged-in identity.
3. Each company gets a score per topic, compared with its own normal level.
4. You pick topics to watch. Accounts that surge on them show up in a feed or a filter.
5. You contact the accounts that both fit your profile and surge, starting with the strongest.

Worked example, with placeholders:

Topic watched:     "email verification"
Account:           Acme (acme.com), 120 employees
Normal weekly:     low
This week:         surging
Action:            pull VPs of Marketing at acme.com, email this week

Acme was already in your target list. The surge only moved it to the top. The signal does not name the buyer, so you still need a people list to act on it.

Intent data vs firmographic and technographic data

Teams mix these up because all three narrow a list. They answer different questions, and only intent changes week to week.

Firmographic and technographic data tell you the fit. Intent data tells you the timing. A good list needs fit first, because timing on a bad-fit account is wasted effort.

When it matters

Long sales cycles with a few big accounts

Intent earns its cost when you sell one deal to a buying committee over months. With 200 target accounts, knowing which 20 are active changes where reps spend time. The signal is the least useful on small, fast deals.

Large target lists, small team

If you hold 5,000 accounts and have three reps, you must pick. A surge score is one way to order the list. A free proxy such as a recent funding round or a new tool in the stack is another.

Ad targeting and content

Marketers use intent to choose which accounts see ads or get a nurture email. This is the use where account-level data fits best, because you do not need a named person.

Cold email to a clean list

Here intent is optional. Send to the right title at the right size of company, check the email status, and add intent later if replies are low. Do not pay for a feed before your list is deliverable.

How LeadOcean handles it

LeadOcean does not sell intent data. It has no surge score, no topic feed and no buying-signal field. If a vendor lists intent in a table, check whether it is licensed from a third party. Cognism says its intent data uses Bombora Company Surge with up to 12 topics on its Pro plan (Cognism pricing, September 2026). Lead411 says its buyer intent is licensed from Bombora (Lead411 FAQ, September 2026).

What LeadOcean has are filters you can use as proxy signals. technologyCategories and technologies show what a company runs on its website, across about 7.8M crawled sites. minLastFundingYear and maxLastFundingYear find recently funded companies. keywords searches the person's own profile text. None of these is behavior, so call them fit signals, not intent.

On 2026-10-01, leadocean_count_leads returned 1,680 mailable people (verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all) with technologyCategories Marketing automation, jobLevel VP, jobFunction Advertising & Marketing and country US. That is a technology-fit count, not an intent count. Sizing is free: send count=true as a query parameter with limit=1 (LeadOcean OpenAPI, September 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true&limit=1" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"technologyCategories": ["Marketing automation"], "jobLevel": ["VP"], "jobFunction": ["Advertising & Marketing"], "country": ["US"]}'

Drop count=true and set limit to pull rows. Each person returned counts one record. The same filters work in the MCP server and on the Exports page of the app (app.leadocean.io), which shows the record price before you start.

If you already buy intent from another source, export your surging accounts as domains. Then use GET /v1/companies/{domain}/people to list the people at each one. Pricing is two plans: Free (1,000 records, one-off, no card) and Pro at $499 a month. See pricing.

For vendors that do bundle intent, compare them in best intent data providers. For the people and company data under any intent feed, see best B2B databases and best B2B data providers in the UK. More guides are in the blog hub.

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