G2 Buyer Intent: Pricing, How It Works & Alternatives (2026)

G2 Buyer Intent is an add-on data product that flags which companies are researching your product, your category, or your competitors on G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. It’s sold on top of G2’s paid seller plans (Starter, Professional, Enterprise), with G2 declining to publish add-on pricing — reported deals run from roughly $10,000 to $95,000+ a year. It fits mid-market and enterprise SaaS vendors already running ABM or outbound programs, not early-stage companies without a G2 profile worth researching.

What is G2 Buyer Intent?

Buyer intent, as a category of data, is a record of the specific research actions a company’s employees take before a purchase — reading a comparison, checking pricing, downloading a report — used to flag which accounts are actively evaluating a solution rather than just existing in a target list. It’s a proxy for “in-market now” built from behavior instead of firmographic guesswork.

G2 Buyer Intent is G2’s version of that idea, built entirely from first-party activity on its own network. When someone with a business email domain visits a product profile, reads a comparison, or checks a pricing page across G2, Capterra, Software Advice, or GetApp, that action is logged, matched to a company, and surfaced to any vendor with a Buyer Intent subscription in that category. G2 expanded the product to pull signals from all four discovery sites it owns, which it says roughly doubles the signal volume compared with G2.com alone, according to G2’s own announcement. The pitch is straightforward: instead of inferring intent from third-party browsing patterns across the open web, you get a direct feed of who looked at you, who looked at your competitors, and how far along they are.

How G2 Buyer Intent works

G2 groups intent activity into nine documented signal types, according to its Buyer Intent data reference. They fall into a few functional groups, plus two scoring layers that tell you what the activity means and how urgently to act on it.

Profile, pricing, and category signals

A Profile signal fires when someone views your product’s G2 page directly — the clearest single-brand interest signal G2 records. A Pricing signal fires when they open your pricing tab, which G2 flags as a sign the conversation has moved from features to budget. A Category signal is broader: someone browsed a category page that includes your product, which is early and doesn’t necessarily mean they know you exist yet — they’re aware of the problem, not yet the players.

Comparison, alternatives, and competitive signals

These are the signals G2 markets hardest because they name the fight. A Compare signal means someone loaded a head-to-head page featuring your product and at least one competitor. An Alternatives signal means they viewed an alternatives page for your product or a rival’s, inside a category you’re subscribed to. A Competitive signal is the mirror image — someone viewed a competitor’s pricing, profile, or comparison page in your shared category, which tells you a deal is in motion even before your own brand shows up in it.

Content and sponsored signals

G2 also tracks engagement with paid and licensed content: Sponsored content covers ad interactions on G2 itself, Licensed content covers engagement with G2 research reports a vendor has licensed for distribution, and Reference page covers views of customer-reference content. These are lower-volume but useful for tying content and ad spend back to specific accounts rather than anonymous traffic.

Buying Stage and Activity Level scoring

Raw signals get rolled up into two account-level scores, updated daily per the documentation: Buying Stage (Awareness, Consideration, or Decision) estimates where an account sits in its purchase journey, and Activity Level (Low, Medium, High) measures how intensely they’re researching right now. In practice this is what turns a signal feed into a workable priority list — sales teams triage High-activity, Decision-stage accounts first rather than reading raw event logs.

Where the data goes: integrations

Per G2’s Buyer Intent data page, the product connects into Salesforce and HubSpot for CRM sync, Marketo for marketing automation, and ABM/GTM platforms including 6sense, Demandbase, Chili Piper, and Outreach, plus data enrichment through ZoomInfo and LinkedIn. The Demandbase integration documentation shows the mechanics in more detail: signals map to Demandbase accounts through domain matching, using case-sensitive keyword tags like “comparisons.show” and “product_reference”, each carrying a G2-recommended engagement score. G2 has also started pushing signals into G2 MCP, its interface for surfacing buyer data inside AI-driven sales workflows — new as of 2026 and worth confirming still applies to your specific plan before you budget around it.

G2 Buyer Intent pricing

G2 does not publish Buyer Intent pricing anywhere in its public materials. What follows is the base seller-plan pricing G2 does publish, plus reported figures for the Buyer Intent add-on pulled from procurement-data sites and negotiation guides — treat the add-on numbers as directional, not a quote, and confirm with G2 sales for your specific category and package. Figures below are as of July 2026.

Plan	Base plan cost (published or reported)	Buyer Intent status	Reported add-on cost
Free	$0	Not available	—
Starter	$299/month or $2,999/year (year-one discount), per sell.g2.com/plans	Add-on only	Not typically sold at this tier; buyers report needing Professional or above to get meaningful category coverage
Professional	Reported $13,500–$17,700/year list, $11,400–$13,500 negotiated, per Vendr	Add-on only	Reported $10,000–$40,000/year depending on category competitiveness, per SyncGTM
Enterprise	Reported $21,300–$28,300/year list, $17,500–$21,300 negotiated, per Vendr	Add-on only	Reported combined packages (plan + Buyer Intent + other add-ons) from $40,000 up to $87,000–$95,000/year, per Prospeo and Vendr

A few patterns show up consistently across the sourcing. First, Buyer Intent is never bundled free into a plan — it’s add-on revenue at every tier above Free, confirmed directly on G2’s own plans page. Second, cost scales with your category: a crowded category (CRM, project management) means more competitive signal volume and a higher quote than a thin one. Third, add-ons in general — Buyer Intent, Connector Apps, Grid Report licensing — are reported to add 20–50% or more on top of the base plan cost, per Vendr’s deal data. If your rep quotes a number, ask specifically what signal types and how many categories it covers — “Buyer Intent” as a line item can mean very different data volumes depending on your subscribed categories.

What G2 Buyer Intent does well

The strongest argument for G2 Buyer Intent is that it’s first-party: the person actually visited G2 and did the thing the signal says they did, instead of a third party inferring interest from anonymized browsing patterns elsewhere. That distinction shows up in G2’s published case studies, which is where the product’s real evidence lives rather than in marketing copy.

Metadata ran a controlled comparison and reported a $108.80 average cost per lead on ads targeted using G2 Buyer Intent versus $186.94 for a demographic-only control group — a 42% reduction — along with a 12% higher conversion rate and an 18% larger average deal size for the intent-targeted group. impact.com reported cutting cost per lead from $120 to $53 using the same product. Demandbase reported qualifying $3.5 million in pipeline in a single quarter, including 12 competitive-takeout opportunities surfaced by Competitive signals. ZoomInfo reported a 17% higher conversion rate and 27% lower CPL. These are vendor-published case studies, not independent audits, so treat the exact percentages as best-case outcomes rather than typical ones — but the pattern (lower CPL, higher intent-to-close quality when signals are used to target known accounts) recurs across multiple, unrelated companies, which is more convincing than any single number.

The integration depth is also a genuine strength for teams that already run Salesforce, HubSpot, or an ABM platform like Demandbase or 6sense — the signals arrive where sales and marketing already work, tagged with account-level scoring, rather than as a spreadsheet someone has to manually cross-reference.

Limitations to know before buying

The category-dependence cuts both ways, and it’s the first thing to check before signing anything. If your product sits in a category with light G2 traffic — narrow vertical software, low review count, few competitors listed — Buyer Intent has a thin base of signals to draw from no matter what you pay. The product’s value is a direct function of how much research activity happens in your specific category on G2’s network, and G2 doesn’t disclose expected signal volume by category before you buy.

A profile view is not a buyer. G2’s own documentation frames signals as indicators of “awareness” and “interest,” which is honest, but it’s easy for a sales team under quota pressure to treat a Category or Profile signal as a hot lead when it might be a student, a competitor’s own research team, an analyst, or someone who bounced off the page in four seconds. The Buying Stage and Activity Level scores help filter noise, but they’re modeled estimates, not confirmed purchase intent — the same caveat that applies to every intent product on the market, G2 included.

Coverage is bounded by G2’s own traffic, not the buyer’s total research footprint. A company evaluating your category might spend most of its research time on your own website, in analyst reports, in Slack communities, or asking peers — none of which G2 can see. Independent reviews echo this: SyncGTM’s analysis estimates G2 signals may represent only 10–20% of total buyer research activity depending on the vertical, and notes that contact-level enrichment isn’t included — you get the company, not the person, which means you still need a separate tool to find who to actually call.

Cost relative to contract minimums is the last honest concern. Buyer Intent is an add-on layered on top of a Professional or Enterprise seller plan that already runs five figures — you’re not paying $10K–$40K in isolation, you’re paying that on top of a base subscription you’d need regardless. For a company evaluating whether the intent layer specifically is worth it, that’s the number to isolate in a renewal conversation, not the blended total. And the Reddit-thread version of the criticism, however unscientific, is worth hearing: some sales teams describe cold outreach off intent signals landing on accounts that “have no idea what I’m talking about” — a reminder that signals need to be paired with a coherent outreach motion, not just handed to an SDR as a dial list.

G2 Buyer Intent alternatives

The single most useful mental model for shopping this category is first-party versus third-party. G2 Buyer Intent, Spotsaas Buyer Intel, and TechTarget Priority Engine are first-party — they only see activity on their own properties, but what they see is real and directly attributable. Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo Intent, and Demandbase are third-party (or blended) — they aggregate signals across a much larger swath of the open web, which means broader coverage but noisier attribution and less certainty about what a given company actually did. Neither model is strictly better; they answer different questions. First-party tells you what happened on one specific platform with high confidence. Third-party tells you a broader story about a company’s research behavior with lower confidence per signal. For a deeper comparison of the full category, see Spotsaas’s roundup of the best buyer intent data providers.

Bombora

Bombora, a privately held B2B intent-data co-op founded in 2014, is the reference point for third-party intent. Instead of tracking one platform, it runs a consent-based network of more than 5,000 B2B publisher sites that share anonymized reader behavior, which it aggregates into topic-level “Company Surge” scores. The tradeoff versus G2 is coverage for confidence: Bombora can tell you a company is reading about “CRM software” across dozens of sites, but it can’t tell you they looked at your specific pricing page the way G2 can. It’s most useful layered on top of a first-party signal, not as a replacement for one.

6sense

6sense is an independent AI-driven account-based marketing platform, built around predictive scoring over anonymous web behavior instead of a single review site. It combines third-party intent (licensed and its own web-tracking network) with predictive models that try to identify in-market accounts before they’ve shown any obvious signal at all, plus orchestration tools to act on that list across ads, email, and sales. It’s a heavier, more expensive platform commitment than G2 Buyer Intent, built for teams running full ABM programs rather than teams that just want a feed of who looked at their G2 page.

ZoomInfo Intent

ZoomInfo, the publicly traded (Nasdaq: ZI) B2B contact and company database provider, layers intent scoring on top of its core data asset rather than starting from intent as the product. ZoomInfo Intent has historically combined licensed third-party co-op data with keyword-search activity across ZoomInfo’s own web and database properties; the exact data mix has changed over past partnership arrangements, so confirm current sourcing directly with ZoomInfo before buying. The pitch is convenience — intent scoring sits next to contact and firmographic data you’re likely already using — rather than depth of any single signal type.

Demandbase

Demandbase, founded in San Francisco in 2006, is an enterprise ABM platform combining account intelligence, intent data, orchestration, and — unusually for this category — a native B2B advertising demand-side platform. Its intent product blends a proprietary B2B intent network with third-party data sources to track keyword research and content engagement across the open web. Notably, Demandbase is also one of G2’s own integration partners and a G2 Buyer Intent customer, per its published case study — a useful reminder that “alternative” and “complement” aren’t mutually exclusive in this category.

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder (rebranded from Dealfront back to Leadfeeder in March 2026, after a 2022 merger with German sales-intelligence firm Echobot) takes a different angle entirely: website visitor identification. Instead of telling you who researched you on a third-party platform, it de-anonymizes traffic on your own website using IP-to-company matching, so you see which companies are already visiting your pricing or product pages directly. It’s a natural pairing with G2 Buyer Intent instead of a straight substitute — G2 tells you who’s researching the category, Leadfeeder tells you who’s already on your site.

TechTarget Priority Engine

Priority Engine, owned by Informa TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT, majority-owned by Informa PLC following their December 2024 merger), is purpose-built for technology and IT buyers researching across TechTarget’s network of over 220 media properties. Like G2, it’s first-party to its own network — the difference is TechTarget’s audience skews toward IT infrastructure, security, and enterprise tech research instead of the broader SaaS-category mix G2 covers, and it includes permissioned, named-contact data rather than account-level-only signals. It’s a stronger fit for vendors selling deep technical infrastructure than for horizontal SaaS categories like HR or marketing software.

Spotsaas Buyer Intel

Disclosure: Spotsaas operates this blog and the buyer intel product described below, so weigh this entry accordingly. Spotsaas Buyer Intel is first-party intent built from research activity on Spotsaas’s own category and product pages — the same “we saw it happen on our platform” model as G2, at a much smaller traffic base. Instead of G2’s nine-signal taxonomy, it runs three signal modes: resolved company visits (de-anonymized traffic on category and product pages), content-download leads (gated resource requests), and self-qualified buyer requests (visitors who directly ask to be connected with a vendor). Spotsaas sees software research from more than 2 million buyers a year across 24,578 products and 419 categories, backed by 12,400+ verified reviews and its SpotScore rating system. The honest limitation: that traffic base is smaller than G2’s, so raw signal volume runs lower — the tradeoff is that coverage concentrates by category, which can mean cleaner, higher-confidence signals for vendors in categories where Spotsaas has meaningful buyer traffic, instead of a thin trickle spread across a much larger site.

Frequently asked questions

What is buyer intent?

Buyer intent is data that shows a company is actively researching a purchase, based on tracked actions like reading reviews, comparing vendors, or checking pricing rather than static firmographic attributes like industry or headcount. It’s used to prioritize which accounts to contact and when, instead of treating every account on a target list the same way.

Who offers the best intent data?

There’s no single best provider — it depends on where your buyers actually research. First-party platforms like G2 or Spotsaas work if your category has meaningful review-site traffic; broader third-party providers like Bombora or 6sense work better if your buyers research across the open web rather than concentrating on one marketplace. Most serious GTM teams end up combining at least one of each type.

What does buyer intent mean in Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s “intent” signals are a different, narrower thing — they flag engagement with your own LinkedIn content and profile (post views, connection activity) rather than third-party research behavior across review sites. It’s not comparable in depth to G2 Buyer Intent or a dedicated intent-data provider; treat it as a lightweight prioritization layer inside LinkedIn, not a replacement for category-level intent data.

Do I need a G2 profile to buy Buyer Intent?

Yes. Buyer Intent is an add-on sold on top of a paid G2 seller plan (Starter, Professional, or Enterprise), and the signals it surfaces are scoped to your product’s own category on G2. There’s no standalone version that works without an underlying G2 presence.

Is G2 Buyer Intent worth it for a small SaaS company?

Usually not at the entry tier. Reported add-on pricing starts around $10,000/year on top of a Professional plan that itself runs $13,500–$17,700/year, and the product’s value depends on your category having meaningful G2 traffic to begin with. Companies with a thin G2 review base or a niche, low-search category tend to get a shallow signal feed for a five-figure spend — worth a direct conversation with G2 sales about expected signal volume in your specific category before committing.

Keep reading

10 best buyer intent data providers — the full comparison across first-party and third-party options, including pricing and category fit.
Best software review sites in 2026 — where else buyers research software besides G2.

Sources

Last updated: July 17, 2026

G2 Buyer Intent: Pricing, How It Works &#038; Alternatives (2026)