The Public Buying-Signal Index

Context

Why it matters to sales teams

Signal-based selling — reaching an account at the exact moment something changes, rather than cold-prospecting a static list — is the entire premise behind the intent-data category. Vendors like 6sense, Bombora, and Clay charge enterprise contracts to infer “this account is probably in-market” from anonymized web behavior and co-op data pools. It’s indirect, it’s modeled, and it’s expensive.

Public records offer something intent data can’t: first-party, ground-truth events. A company doesn’t “probably” file for an SEC registration, win a federal contract, or receive an FDA warning letter — it either did or it didn’t, on a specific date, in a document you can open. That’s a stronger signal than a modeled propensity score, and in the datasets we mapped, it’s sitting in the open.

We built a catalog of every one of those events we could turn into a structured, actionable signal: 440 live signals (443 defined in source — 3 sit in an unshipped module), across 28 distinct federal sources and agencies.

The taxonomy

Four sales motions

Every signal in the catalog maps to one of the four motions a sales or RevOps team actually runs plays against:

(440 live signals total; percentages rounded.)

Where the signals come from

Agency signal-density ranking

Not all federal sources are equally rich. Ranked by number of distinct signals we could build from each, the top of the list is dominated by healthcare regulators — a function of how granular CMS, FDA, and Open Payments reporting is — with labor, financial, and transportation regulators filling out the rest:

(Counts are on the 440 live signals; the 3 unshipped PECOS signals (all CMS / expansion) are excluded — so recomputing from the 443-row published CSV shows CMS 90 / expansion 171.)

Below the top 10: ClinicalTrials.gov, USDA FSIS, and MSHA (12 each), NLRB and DOL Labor (11 each), TTB (10), FAA (9), PHMSA/FCC/SBA/USPTO (8 each), State WARN notices/SAM.gov-Grants.gov/ VA-HRSA (5 each), IRS (4), HHS-OIG/BLS (2 each), and hospital price-transparency data (1) — 28 sources in total.

Proof of scale

The killer stats

Signal count only matters if the underlying data volume is real. It is:

• FMCSA: 49,727 new motor-carrier registrations in Q2 2026 alone (the last six quarters have ranged 36,774–49,727 — a fair characterization is “~50,000 new carriers entering the market every quarter”).
• OSHA: 854,378 inspections in the dataset — a targeting layer for identifying which facilities and operators are under active regulatory scrutiny right now.
• FDA: 29,227 total Drugs@FDA approvals on record, with 2,016 already logged in 2026 year-to-date — enough approval velocity to build a live “who just got a green light” feed.
• Corporate distress: a 9-marker composite spanning 23,243 subjects/firms — going-concern language, IRS revocations, labor charges, and more, cross-referenced into a single risk signal.
• H-1B / PERM: 210,387 LCA filings and 60,096 PERM cases logged for FY2026 to date, spanning 62,495 distinct employers filing skilled-visa paperwork — a static but substantial targeting universe of companies actively sponsoring visa labor. (This is a point-in-time volume count, not a trend — we’re not claiming a hiring surge, just that 62,495 employers are sitting in public wage-petition data you can target today.)

Sample

What acting on a signal looks like

Abstractions are easy to wave at. Here’s the concrete version: 100 real companies that fired a single new-logo signal — bank-bd-award-winners, triggered whenever a company wins a federal contract — each with a live source link back to usaspending.gov and a suggested next action. A sample:

Each row is verifiable in seconds — click through to the usaspending.gov award record and confirm the contract, the agency, and the date. That’s the difference between a modeled intent score and a public-record signal: nothing to trust, only something to check.

Press pitch

For reporters

Enterprise sales teams reportedly pay 6sense, Bombora, and Clay five and six figures a year for “intent data” that’s really a modeled guess at buyer behavior — meanwhile, the US federal government already publishes 440 structured buying signals, for free, across 28 agencies, covering new-logo events (a company just won a federal contract, launched a trial, or filed a patent), expansion signals (an existing account just scaled into a new category), risk flags (a corporate-distress composite spanning 23,243 firms), and displacement openings — all sourced from primary filings like FMCSA’s ~50,000 new carrier registrations per quarter, FDA’s 29,227 drug approvals, and 854,378 OSHA inspections, each one a click away from its original government record.

Get the data

Download the datasets behind this report

Real rows, released under CC BY 4.0 (the underlying records are U.S. federal works in the public domain).

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