Updated September 28, 2026 | 15 min read

G2 Buyer Intent Data Explained: 9 Signal Types (and How I'd Turn Them Into Meetings)

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Most of your market isn’t buying anything right now. According to G2’s own research shared via Business Wire, only 5% of a company’s ideal customer base is in-market at any given time. So the whole game is finding that 5% before your competitor does. G2 Buyer Intent is one of the few places where that 5% raises its hand in public, by reading your reviews, checking your pricing, and pulling up your comparison pages. And then most vendors let the signal rot in a dashboard for nine days.
I’ve watched teams do exactly that. In this post, I’ll walk you through all nine G2 signal types, how G2 scores buying stage and activity level, what G2 Audiences does with those signals, and the four-step workflow I use to turn a single profile view into a booked meeting before the buyer moves on.

What G2 Buyer Intent Data Is

G2 Buyer Intent is the data G2 captures when companies research your product, your software category, or your competitors. G2 uses IP matching and behavioral tracking to identify which accounts are actively looking at software like yours, then surfaces that activity to vendors with paid G2 profiles.
One detail most explainer articles miss: the data isn’t limited to G2.com. Per G2’s own documentation, Buyer Intent includes research activity from G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. That’s four review properties feeding one table, which matters a lot if your category gets more traffic on Capterra than on G2.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. A buyer visits your profile, reads reviews, or compares you against alternatives. G2 logs that behavior and ties it back to a company. You get visibility into who is researching, not just that someone visited.
The data includes the company name, the pages they viewed, how often they visited, and where they appear to be in the buying process. G2 claims access to over 100 million buyers on its platform, which makes it one of the larger sources of software-specific intent data available today.

Types of G2 Buyer Intent Signals

A “signal” here means a specific action a buyer takes that indicates purchase intent. G2’s documentation lists nine signal types: Profile, Pricing, Alternatives, Category, Compare, Sponsored content, Licensed content, Reference page, and Competitive. Each one carries a different recommended action. Here are the ones I actually build plays around.

Product Profile Views

This signal fires when someone views your G2 profile page. It indicates direct interest in your product, often from a buyer who already knows your name and wants to see reviews, pricing, or feature details.

Pricing Page Views

Someone landed on your pricing information. I treat this as the single highest-value signal in the set, because nobody checks pricing casually. They’re either building a business case or checking whether you’re affordable before they bother booking a call. Route these same-day.

Category Page Views

This signal appears when a company researches your software category broadly, for example “Sales Engagement Software” or “Email Verification Tools.” It typically indicates early-stage research, where the buyer is still learning what options exist.

Comparison and Alternatives Views

This signal appears when a buyer views your comparison pages or alternatives pages. It indicates active evaluation, meaning the buyer is weighing you against specific competitors. If someone is looking at “lemlist vs. Reply.io,” they’re past the awareness stage.

Competitive Signals

These are the ones where the buyer is looking at a competitor’s profile, pricing, or comparison content rather than yours. G2 flags them separately, and they’re the most uncomfortable data in the dashboard. They’re also the most actionable, because you know the account is in-market and you know exactly who you’re up against. In the Detail CSV export, these rows come prefixed with “competitive/” so you can isolate them.
This includes engagement with G2 Reports, Reference content, Licensed content, or Deal pages. Signals from Deal pages often indicate late-stage buying activity, where the buyer is close to a decision and looking for validation or pricing.

How G2 Scores Intent With Buying Stage and Activity Level

G2 shows how deep into the buying process an account is and how actively they’re engaging, not just that they’re researching. Both dimensions help you prioritize which accounts to pursue first.

Buying Stage

G2 infers buying stage from which pages the account visits:
Stage
Typical Behavior
Awareness
Browsing category pages, reading general content
Consideration
Viewing your profile, reading reviews
Decision
Comparing alternatives, visiting pricing or deal pages

Activity Level

Activity level reflects the intensity of engagement, based on frequency and recency of visits:
  • Low: One or two visits over a longer period
  • Medium: Multiple visits within a week or two
  • High: Frequent, recent visits across multiple pages
An account showing “Decision” stage and “High” activity is usually worth prioritizing over one showing “Awareness” and “Low.” The combination of both dimensions gives you a clearer picture than either one alone.
This is also where the manual work starts eating your week, because someone has to read the grid every morning and decide who gets called. lemlist’s Intent Signals agents handle that part differently: signals get scored and routed into the right campaign automatically, so a Decision-stage account doesn’t wait for a human to notice it.

How to Access G2 Buyer Intent Data and Filter by ICP

Once you have a paid G2 vendor profile with Buyer Intent enabled, you’ll see intent signals in G2’s dashboard. The real value comes from filtering signals down to accounts that actually match your ideal customer profile.
One caveat before you budget around this: G2’s documentation is explicit that not all G2 plans receive Buyer Intent signals, and some plans receive more signals than others. So “we have G2” and “we have full intent coverage” are two different statements. Check which tier you’re on before you design a workflow that assumes you’ll see every signal type.

ICP Filters

G2 lets you filter intent signals by firmographics: company size, industry, location, and tech stack. This way, you’re not chasing every company that visits your profile. You’re focusing on the ones that could realistically become customers. If you want to build the same firmographic filters on the prospecting side and pull matching accounts you haven’t seen on G2 yet, you can do it in lemlist’s lead database.
Beyond the main table, G2 also gives you a Firmographic Analytics tab for seeing which segments are driving your signal volume, and a detailed company activity page for drilling into a single account’s history.

Saved Views and Reporting

You can save filter combinations as views, so you don’t have to rebuild them every time you log in. G2 also offers a Buyer Intent reporting dashboard where you can track signal volume and trends over time.
Exports come in two flavors. The standard CSV is company-level and includes a “direct_pageviews” column, which aggregates product profile, pricing, and sponsored content pageviews to show how many signals don’t involve a competitor. The Detail CSV is signal-level, one row per action, with competitor-directed signals prefixed “competitive/”. Use the standard CSV for territory reviews and pipeline forecasting. Use the Detail CSV when you need to write the actual opener and want to know precisely what the buyer looked at.

Email Alerts for High Intent Accounts

G2 allows you to set up notifications when target accounts show intent. You can create watchlists for specific companies or segments, and G2 will email you when accounts on your watchlist become active. Useful if you don’t want to check the dashboard every day.
Worth knowing how the filter logic behaves, because this is where people accidentally silence their own alerts. G2 applies AND logic across multiple filter categories and OR logic within an individual filter. So selecting three industries widens your alert. Adding an industry filter plus a company-size filter plus a signal-type filter narrows it to accounts matching all three at once. Stack four categories and you may get one email a month, then conclude the product doesn’t work.

What Intent Studio Adds to G2 Buyer Intent

Intent Studio is G2’s newer, more advanced audience filtering tool (currently in beta). It allows more granular control over which signals trigger which actions.
For example, you might configure Intent Studio to only surface accounts that viewed your profile at least twice in the past week and also visited a comparison page. That cuts noise and focuses you on the highest-quality signals. As you build the conditions, Intent Studio shows you an estimated audience size, which is the fastest way to catch a filter set that’s too tight. One thing to plan for: changes take effect the next business day, so don’t rebuild your criteria an hour before a campaign launch.

G2 Audiences: Turning Intent Into Ad Targeting

G2 Audiences takes your Buyer Intent signals and turns them into a live ad audience without leaving my.G2. Instead of exporting a CSV, uploading a match list, and watching it go stale in a week, the audience refreshes as accounts move in and out of your intent criteria.
It syncs to LinkedIn Ads, Reddit Ads, Google DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and LiveRamp. The practical use I like: build an audience of accounts showing Competitive and Compare signals in your category, then run a comparison-page ad against only those accounts. Your paid spend follows research behavior instead of a static account list someone built last quarter.

How Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success Use G2 Intent

The data is only useful if teams actually act on it. Here’s how each function operationalizes G2 intent signals.

Sales Plays

SDRs and AEs use G2 intent to prioritize outreach and personalize openers. Accounts showing Consideration or Decision stage go to the top of the call list, above anything sourced from a static list. Openers reference what the account actually researched, something like “Noticed you were comparing X and Y on G2.” When a target account shows activity, it gets routed to the owning rep that same day rather than in the Monday pipeline review.
Then there’s signal stacking, which is where this gets genuinely fun. A G2 Decision-stage signal tells you an account is evaluating. A hiring or funding signal tells you why now. Say an account hits Decision stage on your G2 profile in the same week lemlist detects they’ve opened five SDR roles. That’s not a cold account anymore, that’s a team being built that needs tooling, and lemlist’s Intent Signals agents can enroll it in the matching campaign automatically instead of waiting for someone to cross-reference two tabs. Job changes, tech stack shifts and custom signals work the same way.

Marketing Plays

Marketing teams use intent data to improve targeting and reduce wasted spend:
  • Run targeted ad campaigns so ads only reach high-intent accounts
  • Remove accounts with low activity from expensive programs
  • Tailor landing page content based on what the account researched
  • Push intent signals into ABM platforms like Demandbase or 6sense for coordinated campaigns

Customer Success Plays

Customer success teams monitor existing customers for churn risk or expansion signals:
  • A current customer researching competitors is a churn risk, and worth flagging to the CSM the same day
  • Accounts showing interest in adjacent product categories may be ready for expansion
  • When a customer’s activity level spikes, reach out before they reach out to a competitor
  • Watch renewal-adjacent accounts in the 90 days before contract end, where a single comparison-page view should trigger a conversation

G2 Buyer Intent Integrations With CRM, MAP, and ABM Tools

G2 integrates natively with most of the tools revenue teams already use, so you don’t have to live in G2’s dashboard to act on signals. On the CRM side that’s Salesforce and HubSpot. For marketing automation, Marketo and Pardot. For ABM, Demandbase and 6sense. For sales engagement, tools like Outreach and Salesloft pick up the signal and turn it into a task or a sequence enrollment.
The flow runs both directions, which surprises people. Certain G2 integrations, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Bombora, add supplemental information back into the Buyer Intent table itself. So Bombora isn’t purely an alternative to G2. Connected properly, it makes the G2 table richer.
Integrations push intent signals into your existing workflows, where they can trigger tasks, update lead scores, or enroll accounts in campaigns automatically. The goal is getting the signal to the right person at the right time, without manual exports.

How to Turn a G2 Buyer Intent Signal Into a Booked Meeting

A signal from two weeks ago is worth a fraction of one from yesterday, and the buyer you saw on Tuesday may have a shortlist by Friday. Here’s the workflow I run.

Step 1: Route the signal into a watchlist

Export the signal or push it into your CRM or outreach tool. Speed matters here. If only 5% of your market is in-market at once, catching one of them mid-research and then responding nine days later is close to wasting the signal entirely.

Step 2: Enrich the account and verify contacts

G2 gives you the company, but you still need verified contact information for decision-makers. Waterfall enrichment (checking multiple data providers in sequence until one returns a verified result) helps you find accurate emails and phone numbers without manual research. lemlist’s Email Finder & Verifier runs across 14+ providers, and the phone finder & verifier does the same for direct dials, so you’re not paying for four data tools and reconciling them by hand.

Step 3: Personalize the opener around the signal

Referencing what the account researched makes outreach stronger. “Saw you were comparing X and Y” performs better than generic messaging. AI personalization can help you scale this without writing every message by hand. The key is putting the signal context in the message itself, not just in your notes.

Step 4: Launch a multichannel sequence

One email rarely gets a response. Coordinate email, LinkedIn, and calls in a single sequence. With lemlist’s multichannel sequences, the campaign fires automatically when an intent signal is detected, so nobody is manually enrolling accounts one at a time. You reach the buyer across several touchpoints while the intent is still fresh.

G2 Buyer Intent vs Bombora, 6sense, and First-Party Signals

G2 is one source of intent data. Here’s how it compares to the alternatives.
Source
What It Tracks
Best For
G2 Buyer Intent
Activity on G2, Capterra, Software Advice, GetApp
Catching buyers comparing software
Bombora
Content consumption across B2B publisher co-op
Broad topic-level intent
6sense
Multi-source aggregation with AI predictions
Account-level scoring at scale
First-party signals
Your website, content, product usage
Highest accuracy, limited reach
Most teams get the best results by combining sources. G2 tells you who is comparing software. Bombora tells you who is researching topics. First-party signals tell you who is engaging with your own content. Together they give you a fuller picture than any single source.
Here’s my honest take after watching a lot of teams try this. Buying a second intent source rarely fixes anything on its own, because the bottleneck was never signal volume. It’s that someone has to sit between the signal and the outreach, cross-referencing tabs every morning. Signals pay off when they’re routed to action automatically. That’s the whole premise behind how we built lemlist’s Intent Signals agents: one workflow where the signal fires, the account gets enriched, and the sequence starts, with no human in the middle deciding whether today is the day.

Limitations of G2 Buyer Intent and How to Fill the Gaps

G2 intent data has real limitations worth understanding:
  • Review-site activity only, meaning G2, Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp, with nothing from your own website, LinkedIn, or the broader web
  • It gives you the company, not always the specific buyer
  • Coverage depends on how much traffic your category gets on review sites
  • IP matching struggles with smaller companies and remote workers on residential IPs
  • Signal volume depends on your subscription tier, so two vendors on different plans see very different amounts of data
Teams fill the gaps by layering in other intent sources (Bombora, first-party tracking), using enrichment tools to find the right contacts, and running multichannel outreach to raise the odds of reaching the actual decision-maker. No single intent source covers everything.

Where to Go From Here

G2 Buyer Intent shows you who is researching. Acting fast on that signal is what turns data into pipeline.
The workflow is straightforward: capture the signal, enrich the account, personalize the message, and launch a coordinated sequence before the buyer moves on. Teams that do this consistently book more meetings than teams that let intent data sit in a dashboard, and that gap comes down to hours, not strategy.
Teams rate lemlist 4.6/5 across more than 2,000 G2 reviews for turning signals like these into pipeline. If you want to do the same without the manual research, Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required, cancel anytime.

FAQs About G2 Buyer Intent Data

How much does G2 Buyer Intent cost?

G2 Buyer Intent is a paid add-on to G2’s vendor subscription. Pricing varies based on your profile tier and contract. Contact G2 Sales for a custom quote.

Do all G2 plans include the same Buyer Intent signals?

No. G2’s documentation states that not all plans receive Buyer Intent signals, and some plans receive more signals than others. Confirm which signal types your tier includes before you build alerts or campaigns that assume full coverage.

Is G2 Buyer Intent useful for small sales teams?

Yes, though the value depends on how much traffic your category gets and whether you have the bandwidth to act on signals quickly. Smaller teams get the most out of it when they pair G2 intent with an outreach tool that automates the follow-up.

How accurate is G2’s IP matching for identifying companies?

G2 uses IP-to-company matching, which is generally reliable for larger companies but can miss smaller organizations or remote workers on residential IPs. Accuracy improves when you filter signals by ICP criteria.
No. Buyer Intent is only available to G2 customers with a paid vendor profile. Free G2 profiles do not include intent data access.

How often does G2 Buyer Intent data refresh?

G2 updates Buyer Intent signals daily, so you can see recent activity within a day of it occurring.
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