Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, is the discipline of gathering information from publicly available sources — websites, social media, public records, images, leaked databases, and more — and turning it into an answer, an assessment, or a decision. What separates OSINT from ordinary web searching is method: an investigator starts from a precise question, chooses sources deliberately, corroborates every finding, and documents the trail so it can be reproduced.
OSINT is used across cybersecurity, journalism, law enforcement, fraud investigation, due diligence, and recruitment. Because the raw material is public, the value an analyst adds is not privileged access but skill — knowing where to look, how to pivot from one clue to the next, and how to verify what they find.