Signal Decay Window

Signal Decay Window is the framework for pricing how long a piece of competitive intelligence stays useful. Ad spend patterns, traffic shifts, and tender awards all lose decision value at different rates: a competitor's display creative rotation may be stale in two weeks, while a government contract award stays actionable for a full procurement cycle. Agencies that treat every data point as equally durable end up pitching last quarter's market to this quarter's buyer. The practical move is to tag each intelligence input with a half-life and rebuild client deliverables around the shortest one. Sell to State indexes 1.4 million contract awards across 194 countries, and those awards remain relevant far longer than a Similarweb traffic spike, so a single retainer cannot refresh both on the same cadence. Forrester's 2027 predictions note that AI growth is colliding with energy and infrastructure limits, which raises API costs and makes over-refreshing an expensive habit. Match refresh frequency to decay rate, not to habit.