B2B Buying Signals: Hiring, Ads, Press & Products

Which companies on your list are worth a call this week? Give it a list of companies and it checks five public signals for each one: who is hiring and for what, who is advertising on Google, who is in the news, who runs a Shopify store and who ships mobile apps.

No LinkedIn, no data broker, no API keys, no account. Every number comes with the source behind it.

What does this do?

Sales intelligence tools charge per seat to tell you a company "shows intent". This one shows you the evidence instead, from sources anyone can check.

flowchart LR
    A[Your company list] --> B[Careers boards<br/>10 systems]
    A --> C[Google ad library]
    A --> D[Google News]
    A --> E[Shopify catalogue]
    A --> F[Apple App Store]
    B --> G[One row per company:<br/>graded signals<br/>with the evidence]
    C --> G
    D --> G
    E --> G
    F --> G

Who is it for?

You are	You use it to
B2B sales and BD	Work a target list in order: the companies hiring hard and spending on ads are the ones with budget moving
Agencies	Spot brands that just started advertising, or launched a store, and pitch while it is live
Recruiters	Find the companies hiring in volume this month, and what they are hiring for
Investors and analysts	Track hiring, ad spend and press across a portfolio or a sector, weekly
Anyone qualifying inbound	Check in seconds whether a company that filled in your form is actually active

What data do you get?

One row per company:

Field	Meaning
activityLevel, activityScore	busy, active, quiet or nothing found — and the 0–11 score behind it
signals	The plain-English list: what is happening at this company right now
hiringSignal, openRoles, rolesPostedLast30Days, hiringFor	How hard they are hiring, and for what, from their own careers board
careersBoard, careersBoardSystem	Which board, and a link — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workable, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters, Personio, Breezy HR, Teamtailor or Workday
advertisingSignal, adsRunning, adFormats, adsUrl	How many Google ads they are running, the text/image/video split, and the link to see them
pressSignal, articlesLast30Days, topOutlets, latestHeadlines	Coverage in the last 30 and 90 days, with the outlets and the actual headlines
shopifyStore, shopifyProducts, shopifyNewProducts30Days	Whether they run a public Shopify catalogue and whether it is moving
mobileApps, appNames	Apps published under the company's own name
whyUnknown	Why any signal could not be read, so a blank is never mistaken for a zero

Example: five companies, September 2026

One run from Apify's servers, 8.4 seconds:

Company	Level	What it found
stripe.com	busy (10)	665 open roles, 100 posted in 30 days · 600–700 Google ads · 68 articles in 30 days · 3 apps
figma.com	busy (10)	152 open roles, 33 posted in 30 days · 400–500 ads · strong press · 2 apps
gymshark.com	busy (10)	24 open roles, 21 posted in 30 days · 3,000–4,000 ads · Shopify store · 2 apps
posthog.com	active (7)	9 open roles, 5 posted in 30 days · 200–300 ads · moderate press
tarsnap.com	nothing found (0)	No public board, no ads, no recent coverage

Gymshark is the interesting row: a small board, but 21 of its 24 roles were posted in the last month and it is running thousands of ads. That is a company in motion, and a headcount number alone would have missed it.

How the grading works, and what it refuses to do

• Each signal is graded on what was observed: strong, moderate, light, none — or unknown, which is different. A company with no findable careers board is not "not hiring"; whyUnknown says so in words. Unknown never counts towards the score.
• Advertising uses the low end of Google's range. Google publishes "600–700 ads", so the grade is based on 600: the number we can stand behind.
• Press means the last 30 days, because that is what being in the news means. The 90-day figure is there for context.
• The bands are calibrated against a real spread, not invented: Tarsnap and SourceHut score 0, Pinboard 3, Basecamp and PostHog 7, Stripe and Figma 10. "Busy" is reserved for 8 and above so it keeps meaning something.
• Long lists should turn the ad format split off. The ad count costs one request per company; splitting it into text, image and video costs three more, and Google starts refusing a server after roughly a hundred requests. A 24-company run with the split on came back with 14 advertising signals unreadable; the same list with Split ads into text, image and video turned off came back with none. The split is never fetched for a company running no ads.
• The score compares companies read the same way. Change the country or turn off a signal and the scores shift; compare within a run, not across runs with different settings.

What it does not do

It does not name people, find email addresses or read LinkedIn. Every source here is a company's own public output: its careers board, its ads, its press, its catalogue, its apps. That is a deliberate limit — it is what keeps the Actor working without logins, proxies or a data broker's terms of use.

Popular signal reports

Ready-made runs you can open and start, or copy as a starting point:

• SaaS Buying Signals: Who Is Hiring and Advertising
• Ecommerce Brand Signals: Ads, Stores and Hiring
• Fintech Buying Signals: Hiring, Ads and Press
• AI Company Signals: Who Is Hiring and Spending
• Which Companies Are Hiring Right Now, and For What
• Who Is Advertising on Google, and How Heavily
• UK Company Signals: Hiring, Ads and Press
• German Company Signals: Hiring, Ads and Press
• Shopify Brands: Catalogue Size and New Products
• Which Companies Are in the News This Month
• HR Tech Buying Signals: Hiring, Ads and Press
• Developer Tools Signals: Hiring, Ads and Press
• Travel Company Signals: Ads, Hiring and Press
• Agency Prospecting: Brands That Just Started Advertising
• Portfolio Monitoring: Hiring, Ads and Press Weekly

Pricing

$0.03 per company report, whatever it finds. All five signals are included; a company where nothing is found still costs $0.03, because the checks were still run — but a run that hits your spending limit stops rather than charging past it.

A hundred companies cost $3.00. The example run above used under a cent of platform usage at 512 MB.

Input

Setting	What it does
Companies	One per line. A website works best; a name also works, and a Workday careers link is read directly
Signals to read	Any of hiring, advertising, press, Shopify, apps — fewer signals means a faster, cheaper run
Country	Which country's Google ads, news and app store to read
Roles to read per company	How many open roles to read when working out what they are hiring for
Split ads into text, image and video	On by default; turn it off for lists longer than about twenty companies

Integrations

Runs on a schedule and connects to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or your own code through the Apify API. A weekly run over the same list turns these snapshots into a change feed: who started hiring, who started advertising, who went quiet.