What signals are
Automatic notices about what changed in your markets, so you do not have to find it by reading charts every morning.
Everything else in JustRanks waits for you to look. Signals do the looking.
Each night, after the day's capture, a set of detectors compares the new data against the recent past and writes a notice whenever something crossed a threshold: a competitor appeared, a badge was won or lost, a position jumped, a promotion started, a listing was rewritten.
Why they are not just alerts
An alert tells you a number crossed a line. A signal tells you what happened, in which market, to which product, with the numbers attached and a link into the view where you can check it.
That distinction matters because most threshold alerts are noise. A position moving from 12 to 15 is nothing in a volatile market and worth knowing in a calm one. Signals are rated by how much the movement actually means in that specific market, not by the size of the number alone — which is why a quiet market produces few of them and a turbulent one does not bury you.
Severity
Every signal carries a severity. The inbox shows only the more serious ones by default; the rest are there when you want the full picture, but they are not what you should read every day.
Severity depends on two things: how strongly something moved, and how relevant that market is. The same movement is not equally important everywhere.
When they appear
Signals need history — they are comparisons. A new market produces none on its first day and starts producing them once there is a previous state to compare against. See Your first week.
They are generated once per day, after the capture. They do not arrive in real time, and nothing in JustRanks does: the underlying data is a daily measurement.