How we score competitor momentum (and why it excludes SEO data)

Ripplewatch's Momentum score compares two adjacent 30-day windows across four signal types — hiring, pricing activity, press/funding, and relevance-score trend — and averages whichever components have data into a single -100 to +100 index. Above +15 is Heating up, below -15 is Cooling, and everything in between is Steady.

Every competitor page in Ripplewatch shows a Momentum badge: Heating up, Steady, Cooling, or Not enough history yet. It answers one question at a glance: is this competitor speeding up or slowing down right now? Here's exactly how it's computed.

What four inputs make up the Momentum score?

Momentum compares two adjacent 30-day windows (this month against the one before it) across four signal types Ripplewatch already tracks:

• Hiring: job posting volume
• Pricing activity: pricing page changes
• Press & funding: news and funding events
• Relevance trend: how the average relevance score of scored signals is moving

Pricing activity depends on actually being able to read a competitor's pricing page in the first place — see getting pricing data reliably for how we handle pages that block scraping.

Each component turns into a bounded index from -100 to +100. Zero means no change between windows. The score approaches ±100 as activity swings almost entirely into one window or the other. A small smoothing constant keeps a single new signal (one this month, zero last) from immediately maxing out the score the way a raw percentage-change calculation would.

Why isn't SEO/traffic data included in Momentum yet?

There's a fifth signal type we track, SEO/traffic activity, but it's currently a stubbed data source and only available on Plus and Advanced plans. Folding a stub into Momentum would make the score meaningless for Starter accounts, and simply wrong for everyone else, until real traffic data is wired in. So Momentum only averages the components that actually have data for a given competitor. A competitor with zero signals in both windows across all four components shows "Not enough history yet" instead of a misleading zero. That's also consistent with how the category treats it generally: most tools in the category bucket it distinctly rather than blending it into a single activity score.

Where do the Heating up, Steady, and Cooling thresholds land?

The final score is the average of whichever components have data. Above +15, we call it Heating up. Below -15, Cooling. Everything in between is Steady. Those thresholds are intentionally conservative, so a single noisy week of hiring doesn't flip a competitor's label back and forth. Momentum is one of eight things worth tracking about a competitor overall — see what a competitive intelligence dashboard should track for the fuller list and where most tools have gaps.

It's also why Momentum shows up in two places, the Trends dashboard and the Competitors list badge, pulling from the exact same calculation. The two views can't drift into disagreeing about the same competitor.