Bombora

What it is

Bombora is a wholesale supplier of third-party B2B intent data. Its core product, Company Surge®, watches what content companies read across a data co-op of B2B publishers and brand sites, then flags which accounts are researching a topic more than they usually do. Most intent data you meet inside other tools starts here. 6sense, Warmly, RollWorks, Apollo, Cognism and dozens of other platforms license the feed and show it under their own name.

The co-op is the moat. Bombora says it pulls from thousands of media destinations, which third-party reviews put at about 5,500 sites. It says 86% of the co-op’s data is shared exclusively with Bombora, so competitors cannot buy the same raw consumption. The taxonomy stands at 21,632 topics after the June 2026 “Penguin” release, up from 18,168 in July 2025, and the next release is scheduled for 28 September 2026.

The scoring is simple and worth understanding before you buy. Each week Bombora compares an account’s last three weeks of reading on a topic against its own 12-week baseline, and turns the result into a score from 0 to 100. A score of 60 or more counts as “surging.” Scores regenerate each weekend. The measure is relative, so a small company that suddenly reads about SOC 2 can surge while a large enterprise that always reads about it may not.

Around Company Surge, Bombora sells Visitor Insights (company identification for your own site traffic), B2B digital audiences for ad platforms such as LinkedIn, The Trade Desk, Google, Meta and Amazon DSP, and campaign measurement. Bombora was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Intent Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2025, alongside 6sense, Demandbase, Intentsify and Informa TechTarget.

Direct feed or resold feed

The question this page answers: 6sense and Warmly both quote Bombora intent at me, so should I just buy the raw feed direct?

Buy direct only when you will use more topics, or use them in more places, than a reseller gives you. A reseller hands you a slice. Warmly lets an account track up to 12 Bombora topics, refreshed every Sunday. 6sense receives Company Surge weekly by SFTP and blends it with its own signals in its predictive models, so you cannot see or swap the Bombora input on its own. A direct contract gives you the scores themselves. You pick your topic set, you land the file in Salesforce, HubSpot or your warehouse, and you can feed the same scores to ads, scoring models and SDR routing at once.

It is also worth knowing who does not resell it. ZoomInfo runs its own intent collection and says it does not use Bombora data. Some older comparisons, including a few of ours, describe ZoomInfo intent as Bombora-powered. That is not the case today.

Pricing reality

Quote-only, annual contracts, no self-serve tier and no free trial. What is known from outside the company:

• Vendr puts the median at about $25,000 a year across 35 purchases, with a range of $13,000 to $80,450. Vendr’s size bands run $25K-$60K for 50-150 topics, $60K-$120K for 150-300 topics, and $120K+ above that.
• Onboarding fees of $5,000-$20,000 and 3-7% annual escalators show up in Vendr’s data. Multi-year terms are reported at 15-25% lower per year.
• Daily refresh and LinkedIn audience activation are extra, according to third-party pricing breakdowns. The base license is weekly, account-level scores.

Worked estimate, marked as one: a mid-market team on 100 topics at the Vendr median, with a $10K onboarding fee, pays about $35,000 in year one. That buys account names and scores and nothing else. There are no contacts in the feed. Add a contact source such as Apollo, Cognism or Lusha and a way to act on the list, and third-party breakdowns put the full program at roughly 2-5x the Bombora line.

Best for

A marketing ops or RevOps leader at a company with 200+ target accounts who already runs the activation layer (a CRM, a MAP, a contact vendor, an ad platform) and wants one topic-level intent source feeding all of it. The scoped case where Bombora wins outright: ranking a named account list by in-market research on 50+ category topics every week, and pushing the same scores to ad audiences and SDR queues without paying for a second orchestration platform.

Not for

Teams without an ICP account list or the ops capacity to act on weekly scores; the data sits unused. Also a poor fit for sales teams that need the name of the person researching, since the feed is account-level. And skip it if you already pay for 6sense or Demandbase and use their intent: you are buying a signal you already have.

Versus the alternatives

• 6sense — one of the two market-share leaders in ABM platforms, with Demandbase. It ingests Bombora alongside its own first-party signals and wraps both in predictive stages, orchestration and advertising. Pick it when you want the model and the plays, not the raw feed. Pick Bombora when you already own the plays and want to control the inputs. See 6sense.
• Demandbase — the other large ABM suite, with its own intent plus account identification and advertising. Pick it for one vendor across ads, sales intelligence and intent. Pick Bombora to feed several tools from one neutral source. See Demandbase.
• Informa TechTarget Priority Engine — intent from about 150 IT publications TechTarget owns, delivered with named contacts. Pick it when you sell to IT buyers and your reps need people, not accounts. Pick Bombora for coverage beyond IT and for ad audiences.
• The signal-stack approach — the fastest-growing alternative is not another feed but composing signals yourself: first-party visitor ID from Warmly or RB2B, plus job changes, hiring and tech installs pulled through Clay. Pick it when your sales motion runs on triggers rather than topic research. Pick Bombora when marketing needs broad category research across the whole account list.

Watch-outs

• You may already be paying for it. Bombora sits inside 6sense, Warmly, RollWorks, Apollo and many others. Guard: before the first call, list every GTM tool you pay for and ask each one in writing whether it resells Company Surge and how many topics you get. If a current tool already gives you 12+ topics you use, test those for a quarter before buying direct.
• Account-level scores do not tell a rep who to call. The feed says a company is surging on a topic, not which person is reading. Guard: budget the contact layer at the same time as the license, and require the pilot to produce routed contacts, not just a surge report.
• Weekly and relative means noisy for small accounts. A 3-week vs 12-week comparison can light up a 40-person company on a few articles. Guard: require two or more related topics to surge before an account enters an SDR queue, and track surge-to-opportunity conversion by account size from month one.
• Topic selection decides the result. With 21,632 topics, a badly chosen set produces confident noise. Guard: build the topic list from the language in your last 20 closed-won deals, and cut any topic that does not lift win rate after two quarters.
• Agent traffic is changing the input. Bombora itself reported bot and agent traffic on publisher sites up about 500% in late 2025, though still around 6% of page views. Guard: ask Bombora how agent traffic is filtered from surge scoring, and re-check your surge-to-pipeline rate each quarter.

Related: intent data explains first-, second- and third-party intent, and account-based marketing covers where a surge score fits in the program.