Buyer-Intent Heat Index
The Buyer-Intent Heat Index tracks where buyer demand is heating up and cooling down across UC, CX and CPaaS, using real Google search behaviour. It shows which tier-one vendors buyers actually search for, and where each one sits in the buying journey. Refreshed weekly.
Each pillar shows a character badge (e.g. "Switching-heavy" or "Vendor-led"), a lead sentence stating the clearest pattern that week, and a tally of how many vendors sit in each buying stage — Awareness through Decision — right now, not a market position.
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Category terms (broad searches like "AI agents," not brand names) show a heat dot — hot, warm, cool, or cold — based on score and momentum together, never one alone. Vendor bars show each name's raw search score (0–100, relative to that term's own recent peak, not search volume) and a stage badge marking which search type — comparison, pricing, or support — is strongest for that vendor; darkest badge (Decision) means comparison-shopping language is showing up strongest.
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Some vendors also carry a switching badge: "High switching search," or, when alt-search volume actually beats their own brand search, "More 'alternatives' searches than brand." This flags vendors where a real share of their search interest is people shopping around, not just looking them up. "What buyers are also searching" pulls directly from real comparison and alternatives volume.
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Read the badges together, not the score alone — a high score with a Decision badge and a high switching signal tells a different story than the same score sitting quietly in Awareness.
Buyer-Intent Heat Index: FAQs
It is a weekly read on where buyer demand is heating up or cooling down across unified communications, customer experience and CPaaS, built from real Google search behaviour rather than vendor claims. It shows how often buyers search for each tier-one vendor, and at which stage of the buying journey they show up.
Every figure comes from live Google Trends search interest, pulled worldwide over a rolling twelve months. Nothing is modelled or estimated. The most recent one to two weeks are held back because Google under-reports them.
Each figure is relative search interest on a 0 to 100 scale, not search volume. Scores are read within a topic, so movement inside a pillar matters more than comparing raw numbers across pillars. Genesys and 8x8 use disambiguated company entities so unrelated card and board games are stripped out.
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The ratio is simply:
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alternative-searches ÷ brand-searches
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Below 1.0 — most people searching the name are looking for that vendor specifically. Normal, healthy.
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At 1.0 — for every person searching the brand, one is actively looking elsewhere. Even odds between staying and shopping.
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Above 1.0 — more people are searching for a way off the brand than for it. That's a red flag.
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Weekly. The vendor share-of-search tables are re-pulled from Google Trends every week and rescaled to a fixed anchor, so week-to-week movement reflects real shifts in demand rather than noise.
Because buyers rarely type the category acronyms. Search demand runs through vendor names and problem language, not the labels the industry uses. On the index the acronyms sit near the floor, which is itself a finding: the category words are close to invisible in real buyer search.