Business Buying Signal Detector

Detect publicly observable business-activity signals ("buying signals") for a list of companies. The Actor reports only concrete, checkable facts — recent news, changes to a company's public website, and optional public hiring activity — and it never infers private intentions. Every signal ships with the evidence behind it, an importance level and a confidence score, so your outreach can cite a real, verifiable event.

What does this Actor do?

For each company it can produce these signal types:

1. News events (news) — recent public articles mentioning the company (Google News RSS). Headlines containing strong indicators (funding, acquisition, expansion, hiring, new contract, etc.) are flagged as higher importance.
2. Website changes (website_changes) — a change to the company's public homepage vs. the previous run: page title or heading structure. Detected via a lightweight fingerprint stored in the Apify key-value store.
3. Technology changes (tech_changes) — a change in the technologies detected on the homepage (analytics, CMS, e-commerce, etc.).
4. New jobs (new_jobs) — best-effort: when the company website is a public Greenhouse or Lever job board, the count of open public roles is reported. Skipped otherwise.

Why use it?

• Sales and partnerships teams get a feed of timing signals — the moment a target is in the news, refreshes its site, or ramps hiring — instead of scraping each source manually.
• Every signal is a public, observable fact with a source URL, so it is safe to act on and easy to verify.

How to use it

1. Provide companies (objects {name, website} or plain strings), or startUrls.
2. Pick the signalTypes to detect (default: all).
3. Optionally add newsKeywords to bias/highlight news matches.
4. Run the Actor. For website/technology change detection, run it on a schedule — the first run records a baseline, later runs report what changed.

Input

Field	Type	Description
companies	array	Companies to scan — objects {name, website} or strings (name, domain, or URL).
startUrls	array	Company website URLs, as an alternative to companies.
signalTypes	array	new_jobs, website_changes, news, tech_changes (default: all).
newsKeywords	array	Optional keywords to bias and highlight news matches.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings for news and website requests.

Provide at least one of companies or startUrls.

Input example

{
  "companies": [
    { "name": "Acme Corp", "website": "https://acme.com" },
    "example.com"
  ],
  "signalTypes": ["news", "website_changes"],
  "newsKeywords": ["funding", "expansion"]
}

Output

One record per detected signal:

Field	Description
company	The company the signal is about.
signalType	news_event, website_change, or hiring_activity.
evidence	The observable fact (headline, the field that changed, role count).
sourceUrl	Link to the public source.
timestamp	When the event was published / observed.
importance	low, medium, or high.
confidence	0–1 confidence in the signal.
source	News source (for news events).

Output example

{
  "company": "Acme Corp",
  "signalType": "news_event",
  "evidence": "Acme Corp raises $50M in Series B funding",
  "sourceUrl": "https://news.google.com/articles/...",
  "timestamp": "Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT",
  "importance": "high",
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "source": "TechCrunch"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Change detection & snapshots

Website and technology change detection compares each run against a snapshot stored in the Apify key-value store (via the shared ChangeMonitor). The first run for a website records the baseline and emits no change signals; subsequent runs emit a website_change signal for each field (title, heading structure, technologies) that differs. Schedule the Actor to turn this into a running change feed.

What it does NOT do

• It does not infer intentions, budgets, or private plans — only observable public facts.
• It does not access private, authenticated, or personal data.