Connections are the lifeblood of the internet, with people and businesses interacting and leaving digital traces across social media platforms, online marketplaces, websites, and forums at all hours of the day. For OSINT professionals, these countless interactions are not merely noise—they’re critical data points that can reveal hidden networks and relationships.

Through link analysis, OSINT practitioners are able to surface valuable insights based on online activity and public records of individuals and organizations, and use that information to generate more comprehensive intelligence. In the past, link analysis entailed manually combing through large volumes of data and spreadsheets to build association matrices, eventually shaping them into rudimentary link analysis charts. Investigators took on this painstaking work to better understand siloed datasets and identify patterns, outliers, and other links. However, with modern, automated OSINT solutions, what used to take investigators hours or even days can now be accomplished in minutes.