Signal Decay Half-Life
Signal Decay Half-Life is the window between when a trend first appears in monitoring feeds and when it becomes common knowledge in a client's category.
By InnovaAI ResearchPublished Updated
What is Signal Decay Half-Life?
“Signal half-life → retainer cadence”
Signal Decay Half-Life is the window between when a trend first appears in monitoring feeds and when it becomes common knowledge in a client's category. A signal's half-life is short when the source is a broad aggregator and long when the source is a narrow, high-friction channel. Agencies that treat every alert as equally urgent burn delivery hours chasing spikes that clients already saw; agencies that map each source to a decay window can time content, positioning, and campaign work to land while the signal still carries an edge. The practical move is to sort monitoring sources by how fast they propagate. A daily digest of firsthand interviews, like Recordal, tends to surface operator thinking weeks before trade press picks it up, while a general AI news aggregator such as AI News Report compresses that window to days. Pairing a slow channel with a fast one gives an agency both lead time and confirmation before committing retainer hours.