The decision is made before you are contacted. We measure what happens in the room you can’t enter.
Audience Intel publishes original research on how owner-managed professional-services firms are chosen, compared, and dismissed in the moments before a buyer ever makes contact. The library below collects the studies that grounded our methodology — and the new ones we are running now.
Updated August 2026
Method
Every finding carries how we know it.
A number is only worth what its method is worth. Four labels run through every study and every report we publish, and they are enforced in the software rather than applied by hand.
- Measured
- A deterministic check with one right answer — the page returned this status code, the record shows this filing date, this term returned this volume. Re-run it and you get the same result.
- Inferred
- A model reading evidence and drawing a conclusion — what a page implies about who it is for, how a review climate reads. Traceable to its input, but a judgement, and labelled as one.
- Observed
- Real people, doing the task, recorded. Panel work through Prolific rather than a model's impression of what people would do.
- Simulated
- A modelled population standing in for a real one, used where fieldwork is not yet run. Never presented as though people were asked.
Where a source is unavailable, the study says so and the finding is withheld. It is not quietly filled in. How we try to prove ourselves wrong →
The library
Thirty verified sources. Full citations. Pull-quotes.
The empirical foundation of every Audience Intel report. Organised by domain — from the zero moment of truth through cognitive science to professional-services category data and the new analytical layer.
Forthcoming studies
Three proprietary studies, published as hypothesis and method.
The Fifty-Millisecond Verdict. The £2,000 Decision. The Credibility Ledger. All three are at concept and in design; no fieldwork has been run and no findings are published yet. Publication targets run from Q4 2026.
Research drawn from
- Think with Google
- Gartner
- Forrester
- McKinsey & Company
- Harvard Business Review
- Stanford HAI
- Nielsen Norman Group
- Edelman
- Princeton
- Hinge Research
- LexisNexis
- TrustRadius
Audience Intel’s methodology draws on published studies across cognitive science, B2B buying behaviour, and professional-services marketing. See the full library →
Audience Intel reads your website alongside three named competitors through the eyes of the buyers comparing you.
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