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

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

Four inputs, one 30-day window

Momentum compares two adjacent 30-day windows — the last 30 days versus the 30 before that — 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

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

Why SEO/traffic isn't in the mix yet

We track a fifth signal type — 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, and a competitor with zero signals in both windows across all four components shows "Not enough history yet" instead of a misleading zero.

The thresholds

The final score is the average of whichever components have data. Above +15, we label it Heating up. Below -15, Cooling. Everything in between is Steady. Those thresholds are intentionally conservative — a single noisy week of hiring shouldn't flip a competitor's label back and forth.

This is also why Momentum shows up in two places — the Trends dashboard and the Competitors list badge — pulling from the exact same calculation, so the two views never drift into disagreeing about the same competitor.