Regional demand intelligence with attention kept separate from demand
WantSignal is an independent regional consumer-demand intelligence project for understanding how attention and qualified consumer demand differ by geography. The system preserves source-specific evidence instead of forcing every popular term into a commercial bucket.
Two related product surfaces
Awareness answers what people in a place are paying attention to. Signals focuses on direct or qualified consumer demand. The default demand charts, city/country demand dashboards and main demand map exclude Awareness so a flood of search/video attention cannot visually overpower the smaller set of commercially meaningful observations. Awareness remains fully explorable in its own dedicated workspace and map.
Named entities are not automatically shopping intent
WantSignal resolves known sports teams and leagues, athletes, actors, musicians and other public figures through entity registries and aliases. A bare entity name is informational/awareness evidence by default. Commerce requires additional context: a team name alone is not treated the same as that team plus “jersey,” “tickets” or “merchandise.” The same principle prevents a bare platform destination such as Google from being mistaken for demand for a Google product.
Taxonomy is multidimensional
Normalized observations can carry a topic category and subcategory, taxonomy path, intent type, commercial-intent level, specificity, classification confidence and taxonomy version while preserving the original source signal class. Ambiguous observations remain unresolved until evidence supports a stronger interpretation.
Brands and categories are enrichment layers
WantSignal uses a broad commercial vocabulary plus registries to add context around raw terms. Discovery or category membership does not automatically make an entity trusted commercial evidence. Context, source evidence and intent rules determine how the observation is presented.
Why geography matters
National trends can hide meaningful regional differences. WantSignal validates provider geography rather than assuming a repeated value is local proof. US Google DMA observations are tied to provider DMA identifiers; international Google ADMIN1 observations carry matching country/region provenance. That allows legitimate repeated regional evidence while detecting accidental fan-out.
How the system is built
Collectors and research history remain in the local research system. Raw crawler captures may remain source-native, but promotion into normalized WantSignal observations passes through shared taxonomy, semantic and publication-integrity controls. The public website receives a smaller curated publication layer containing explainable demand signals, a separate Awareness layer and selected commerce opportunities.
Current status
WantSignal is under active development. Source coverage, entity registries, taxonomy rules, scoring and presentation will continue to improve as more history and independent sources accumulate. The FAQ documents current definitions, the Signal Explorer shows qualified demand, and the Awareness Explorer shows attention evidence separately.