How we source every signal, and what we refuse to use.
Most "company intelligence" products sell you a database scraped from everywhere, with no way to tell which rows are real. We go the other way. Every signal in a Signal Brief report is tied to a named, public source. If we cannot cite it, it does not ship.
Sources we use
Our signals come from public-by-intent sources:
- Public job postings, employer career pages, open ATS platforms (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday boards), job aggregators. We read what employers choose to publish.
- Regulatory filings, SEC filings (EDGAR), SAM.gov federal contract records, state and federal registries.
- Press releases, business news, and official announcements, funding announcements, exec-move news, partnership releases, earnings commentary.
- Public professional profiles, LinkedIn pages, founder bios, published interviews. Only public-facing content.
- Company websites, product pages, investor decks the company chose to publish, public blog posts.
- Licensed data providers, for size bands, enrichment, and some metadata we use reputable commercial providers under their terms of use.
Sources we do not use
- Purchased contact databases. No Apollo-style email lists, resume dumps, or phone-number brokers.
- Private or leaked datasets. If a dataset came from a breach, a dark-web dump, or a scraper hitting content behind a login wall, we do not touch it.
- Scraped private signals. No logins, no social-graph scraping, no inferring private information from inbox metadata, no buying clickstream or ad-tech data.
- Screen-scraped gated content. If a source requires authentication or bypasses a paywall, it is off limits.
How we verify
Signals pass through three gates before publication:
- Citation required. Every signal carries a URL to its primary source. No citation, no ship.
- Human review. Every issue is read end-to-end by a person before send. That person is responsible for catching bad signals, broken reasoning, or cases where two sources contradict.
- Sample verification. We verify a random sample of signals against the underlying sources every week. If we find a misread, we note it in the next issue.
LLMs, in plain terms
Reports are written by people. LLMs are in the loop as reviewers, not authors: they check drafts against cited sources, flag claims the evidence does not support, and surface contradictions across signals. Behind the scenes, they also handle backend grunt work, classifying job postings and summarizing long filings into structured fields for the editor to read. The narrative you see was drafted, audited, and signed off by a person before it shipped.
Subjects of Communication Intelligence briefs
Per-person briefs carry the same rules. Every claim about a subject is sourced to something they or their company published, or to credible public reporting. We do not speculate about a person's private life, inferred beliefs, or anything we cannot point to.
If you are a subject of a brief and would like it removed, email contact@signalbrief.us. We will honor the request.
Mistakes
We will make some. When we do, please tell us, contact@signalbrief.us. We publish corrections in the next issue and fix the underlying record so the same mistake does not repeat.