Section 18 · Tools & Reference

18Glossary

Every score, signal, and technical term Instinct uses, in plain English. When a word on a screen leaves you guessing, this is the place to look. Terms are grouped by where you'll meet them.

Scores & signals

Fox Crow Maturity Level (FCML)	A single 1-to-5 rating of how mature and established a company looks, built from public signals and weighted across twelve sub-scores. 1 is Nascent, 5 is Mature. See Section 08.
Territory Health	A 1-to-5 rating (Very Weak to Very Strong) of how strong a company appears within its local market or territory.
Sub-score	One of the twelve component scores that feed the FCML — for example Website, Hiring, or Infrastructure Security. Each is a small gauge you can read on its own.
Signal	An individual verified fact about a company — that it has a website, a LinkedIn page, a current job posting, a compliance mention, and so on. You can filter companies by which signals they have (Section 06).
Completeness	How filled-in a record is, as a percentage — a quick read on how much Instinct has gathered for that company or contact.
AI Confidence Score	How sure Instinct is about an AI-derived fact. Lower confidence means "worth confirming," not "wrong."

Classifying a company

MSP	Managed Service Provider — a company that runs IT for other businesses. Instinct's core subject.
Classification	The primary type Instinct assigns a company: MSP (Primary), Managed Services, Technology, or Other.
Primary Market	The industry a company chiefly serves (Healthcare, Financial Services, and so on).
Services Offered / Service Breadth	The specific services a company provides; Service Breadth is the FCML sub-score reflecting how wide that range is.
Taxonomy	The set of categories — types, markets, and services — Instinct uses to tag and organize companies.

Domains, DNS & email security

Domain	A company's web address (its example.com), and the record Instinct keeps of everything about it.
DNS	Domain Name System — the internet's address book, which points a domain to its website and mail servers.
DNS records (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT)	The individual entries in that address book: A/AAAA point to a site's servers, CNAME is an alias, MX names the mail servers, and TXT holds verification and policy text (including SPF and DMARC).
SPF	Sender Policy Framework — a record listing which servers may send email for a domain. Helps stop spoofing.
DMARC	A policy that tells receiving mail servers what to do with email that fails SPF/DKIM checks, and where to send reports.
DKIM	A cryptographic signature on outgoing mail that proves it really came from the domain.
WHOIS	A domain's public registration details — its registrar, and its created and expiry dates.
Health check	An automated test of a domain's or company's web/technical health, recorded over time.
Detected via DNS / via Logo	How a technology was found: from the company's DNS records (structural, high-confidence) or from a logo seen on its website (visual, worth confirming).

Web pages & search

Crawl	Instinct visiting and reading a web page to capture its content.
Version / Snapshot	A captured copy of a page (or a social profile) at a point in time. Comparing versions shows what changed.
SERP	Search-Engine Results Page — what a search engine returns for a query. Instinct captures these as records (Section 16).
Organic results	The normal, unpaid results on a search page.
Local results	The business listings in the map pack that a search engine shows for local searches.
Featured snippet	The answer box a search engine sometimes places above the results.
SEO	Search Engine Optimization — how well a site is built to be found in search. Instinct audits it (Section 09).
robots.txt / sitemap	Files that tell search engines what to crawl and help them find a site's pages. Part of SEO hygiene.
JSON-LD	Structured data on a page that describes it in a machine-readable way, so search engines can show rich results.
llms.txt	A newer file some sites publish to guide AI tools — its presence is a signal that a company is keeping its site AI-ready.

Revenue & staff estimates

Revenue & Staff estimate	A modeled estimate of a company's size and revenue, shown on the Revenue & Staff tab. Informed estimates, not audited figures.
ARR mix	Annual Recurring Revenue mix — the assumed share of a company's revenue that is recurring, used in the revenue estimate.
EUM	End Users Managed — the estimated number of end users (seats) a company manages for its clients.
AISP	Average per-user price — the estimated average revenue per managed user, paired with EUM to model revenue.

People & connections

Contact	A person on file at a company, with their title and any verified email and phone.
Verified	A badge marking contact details Instinct has been able to confirm.
Membrain	A CRM some organizations connect to Instinct; where linked, a company can be opened in Membrain from its profile.

The bottom line

No term left unexplained.

If Instinct shows you a word, it's defined here. When in doubt, come back to this page — and use Help & Support in the app to reach it any time.