OSINT Source Categories for CI

Competitive OSINT draws from seven source categories, each with distinct characteristics. Government filings: SEC filings, patent applications, trademark registrations, regulatory submissions. High authority, slow update, legally accurate. Corporate publications: press releases, earnings calls, blog posts, career pages. Self-serving but revealing. Financial data: quarterly reports, analyst estimates, funding announcements. Quantitative backbone of competitive analysis. Digital footprint: website changes, pricing pages, product documentation, technology stack. Observable behavior, not stated intent. Social signals: LinkedIn activity, executive posts, Glassdoor reviews, conference presentations. Unfiltered perspective. Industry analysis: analyst reports, market research, trade publications. Professional interpretation with known biases. Community intelligence: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, industry forums. Raw market sentiment.

1. Map Coverage Per Category For each competitor in your tracking set, identify which of the seven categories you have active sources for. Gaps in coverage are gaps in intelligence. A competitor with no digital footprint monitoring is a competitor whose product changes you will discover late.
2. Prioritize by Signal Value Government filings and financial data are high-signal, low-noise. Social signals and community intelligence are high-noise, occasionally high-signal. Build the high-signal categories first. Add noise-rich categories only when you have the filtering infrastructure to extract signal from them.
3. Design for Independence Sources within different categories provide independent corroboration. Sources within the same category often cite each other. A competitive finding confirmed by a government filing and a digital footprint change is more reliable than one confirmed by three analyst reports that cite the same data.