How it works

The fusion is the product

Three public demand signals, joined in one dataset. The value isn’t raw data volume — it’s the convergence.

Search autocomplete+YouTube velocity+Web SERP
Joined per keyword
Source-attributed search intelligence
Evidence, not black-box metrics

Compare the output

Typical SEO tool
Volume1,900
Difficulty34
Source: — ?

A score with no provenance. You can’t see where it came from, or why to trust it.

SourceSignal
  • Autocompletepresent · commercial intent
  • YouTube32k views/day · rising
  • Web SERPreddit #1 · low concentration
Demand confidence0.86

Demand confirmed across sources, with per-source evidence you can audit.

The methodology

The math behind the numbers

No black-box scores. Every headline metric is a formula you can read — here’s exactly how each one is computed, and why.

Demand

Noise-corrected view velocity

demand=viewsdays since publish

Raw view counts reward old viral flukes. We measure sustained daily pull, zero phantom spikes (>1M views on brand-new or un-enriched videos), and count each video once — not once per keyword it ranks for (which would inflate demand ~8×).

Concentration

How winnable the niche is

HHI=isharei2N=1HHI

The Herfindahl index of creator demand-shares: 0 = fragmented, 1 = monopoly. Its inverse N reads plainly — a market can “behave like ~212 equally-sized creators.”

Authority

Creator ranking — footprint over virality

score=demand×log2(1+keywords)2

Squaring the footprint term stops a single viral video outranking a creator who covers the whole niche. A 25-keyword floor drops one-hit channels entirely.

Opportunity

Demand vs. competition

opportunity=demand1+competitors

High demand with few creators is an opening. This re-ranks keywords by how underserved they are, not just raw volume.

Intent

What the search wants

comparison ×5 › commercial ×4 › troubleshooting ×3 › informational ×1

Every keyword is weighted by how buyer-ready its intent is — a “X vs Y” query is worth 5× a “what is X”. Those weights drive the priority queue.

Normalization

Comparable across niches

log10vlohilo×100

Markets span orders of magnitude, so counts are log-scaled to a 0–100 shape and demand bands come from global quantiles — every niche measured on the same ruler.

These are the same formulas behind every report and the free tools — nothing is hidden or proprietary-by-obscurity. The data is the moat; the method is transparent. The panel they run on, and the limits of what it can support, are set out in the methodology.

In development

The attention model

Everyone measuring YouTube measures views. We store how long every video runs, so we can measure the hours behind the clicks — and the two disagree almost everywhere. These are validated against our production data but aren’t in reports yet; we’re showing the working while we build it.

Attention

A view is a click. This is the hour.

attention=demand×duration3600

Watch-hours per day, not clicks per day. It’s a different axis from reach, not a refinement of it — a channel can win the views and lose the hours. Every video counted once, never once per keyword it ranks for.

Completion

Nobody finishes a three-hour video

retention(L)=clamp(0.790.124·lnL,0.15,0.85)

Multiply views by length and a podcast gets credited three full viewer-hours per click. So each view is discounted by an estimated completion rate that falls with length: 3 min keeps 65%, an hour 28%, three hours 15%. The shape is fixed from published retention studies; the constants are calibrated, not measured — YouTube keeps the truth. It halves the >2h band.

Market

Who counts as a competitor

videos ≥ 10footprint ≥ 50 kwfocus ≥ 0.6

Ungated, “most watch-time in home fitness” returns Joe Rogan — three-hour podcasts that mention a kettlebell once. A channel joins a market only if it actually competes there. The focus threshold isn’t arbitrary: focus is bimodal across 624k channels, and 0.6 sits in the empty valley between the two modes.

Size

What a niche is worth in hours

GDP=videosattention×retention

Total watch-hours a day inside a market — its economic size, as opposed to footprint’s coverage. Niches span 34× on this. It also reorders the leaderboard: the biggest channels by hours are often invisible by keyword footprint.

The full analysis — why every niche is really five markets, and which one is open — is in the write-up.

How a report is made

Three steps to your report

01

We map your niche

Seeds expand through search autocomplete into thousands of intent-tagged keywords for your vertical.

02

We collect live signals

Across sources: YouTube engagement velocity and live web SERP composition, joined per keyword.

03

We deliver your report

Analyst-reviewed today, on real data — your rankings, your gaps, the competitor landscape.

Reports are delivered by our team today while we open self-serve — every one built on the same weekly-refreshed data behind the tools you can try right now.

SourceSignal.io

Find the signals hidden in search.

Source-attributed search intelligence. Evidence, not black-box SEO metrics.

© 2026 SourceSignalBuilt on live demand signals across search, YouTube and the web.