Buyer-Intent Heat Index & Share of Voice Methodology
SWNW runs two tracking tools that measure different parts of the same question: where are buyers looking, and who shows up when they do? Both are built from real, observable data — no vendor claims, no self-reported numbers.
Every week, we run a fixed set of real buyer-shaped searches — "best CCaaS platform," "Genesys alternatives" — through Google, in both the UK and the US, and record exactly who shows up on page one.
Vendor share is the percentage of those page-one results held by a named vendor, averaged across every query in that category. It's not "who's winning" — it's how much of the visible territory vendors hold at all, versus resellers, press coverage, or compliance pages crowding them out.
Below that headline number, each vendor gets three separate reads — their own page ranking (Position), how much of their presence is their own site versus someone else naming them (Ownership), and how their share has moved week over week (Trend). A read only appears when there's real evidence behind it; too little data means no badge.
Share of Voice (Members Only)
Known limitations: a few tracked vendor names are also ordinary English words — Front, Fin, Goto, Slack, Prelude, Courier, Vibes. A page mentioning "the front desk" can look, to a simple word-match, like a mention of the vendor Front. There's no way to mechanically tell the two apart, so matches on these names are automatically treated as lower-confidence and excluded from the headline number, rather than silently trusted.
Known limitations: Three tracked vendor names overlap with unrelated search terms — Genesys (a surname), 8x8 (a numeral pattern used elsewhere), and Bird (MessageBird's rebrand, and an ordinary word).
We tested a category-filter fix and it made things worse. A control vendor with no real ambiguity problem still moved -29% to +26% depending on which filter was applied — proof the filtering itself adds noise rather than removing it.
We're stating this plainly rather than filtering or guessing: these three vendors' absolute scores may include unrelated volume. We still track them, since dropping a real vendor over a data-cleanliness issue would leave a bigger gap than the noise itself. Their week-over-week trend and ranking relative to each other stay meaningful.
Buyer-Intent Heat Index
Each week, we pull real Google Trends data for a fixed set of category terms ("business phone system," "AI agents") and named vendors. Every score is relative search interest on a 0–100 scale, measured against that specific term's own recent peak — never raw volume, and only comparable within the same category.
Each vendor gets a stage badge — Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Adoption, or Diffuse — showing which kind of search (comparison, pricing, or support) is driving their volume right now. Category terms get a heat read instead — hot, warm, cool, or cold — based on score and momentum together.
Some vendors also carry a switching badge: real alternatives-search volume measured against their own brand search, flagging when a meaningful share of a vendor's interest is people actively shopping around rather than just looking them up.