Intent data adoption is close to universal in B2B technology marketing. Surveys routinely put the share of marketers calling it essential in the high nineties. Supply is not the constraint.
The constraint is that most teams cannot distinguish a signal that predicts a purchase from a signal that predicts nothing at all, and the vendor market has very little incentive to help them tell the difference. Surge scores arrive in a dashboard, look authoritative, and get acted upon without anyone establishing a baseline for how often they are right.
That is an expensive way to run a targeting strategy.
The three failure modes
Intent data goes wrong in predictable ways.
Account-level surge is computed across an entire domain. In a company of eight thousand people, elevated research activity around your category may come from a procurement team evaluating you, a competitor’s employee doing market research, or a graduate analyst writing an internal brief. The signal is real. Its meaning is not.
Keyword taxonomies are built by vendors, not by your category. A surge on “data governance” tells you something quite different depending on whether the underlying pages were compliance explainers, product comparisons, or job descriptions. Without visibility into the source content, you are trusting a label.
Intent is time-sensitive in a way that vendor refresh cycles often are not. A surge that surfaced three weeks after it occurred is a record of a decision that may already be made. Contact data decays alongside it, and roles change faster than most databases update.
The signal is real. Its meaning is not. That gap is where most intent budgets quietly disappear.
