Research an organization

Ask the assistant to research one of your organizations and it looks the company up on the web, then shows what it found on a research card — each value with the page it came from. You tick what to keep and click Apply. Nothing about the organization changes until you do.

What you can do here

Ask in a session — "Research Acme Corporation", or type @, pick the organization and ask the assistant to research it.
Check each value against the page it came from, tick what you want and apply it as your own edit.
See later where a value came from: the field shows its source on the organization page.
Find the research again in the organization's memory (see What the assistant remembers).

Research starts only from the assistant; there's no research button on the organization page.

What research looks for

Research fills in an organization's firmographics, in this order on the card: Industry, Employees, Annual revenue, Description, Logo, Website, LinkedIn, Headquarters city and Headquarters country. It never changes an organization's name, type, owner, tags or status, and it never adds a phone number, a street address or a custom field.

The research card

The card shows the organization's name, the logo research found and when the research was done. The logo is a copy the app holds for 7 days, so your browser never contacts the company's site to show it. The values come in two groups:

Empty today — will be filled — fields that are empty today. They start ticked.
Already set — suggested change — fields that already have a different value. They start unticked and show your value crossed out beside the new one; tick one to replace your value.

A value the organization already has isn't shown at all — nor is a logo the organization already shows. Each row links to the page the value came from (it opens in a new tab), and hovering over the link shows the sentence research quoted from that page. A number taken from a range, or stated as "about" or "over", is marked ≈.

A Not used note at the bottom lists what research found but left out: each line names the field, the value as found and why — for example "Industry: 'Fintech' isn't one of your industries" or "Annual revenue “€15M”: revenue stated in EUR — not converted". A line under it says that Apply also saves the summary and facts to the organization's memory; you can read them there afterwards.

Click Apply (it shows how many fields it will save, and is disabled while nothing is ticked), or Skip. If you can't edit organizations, Apply is refused: the card says "You can't edit organizations." and turns Apply off — you can still skip. If you reload the page while the card is waiting, it comes back.

How values are checked

Before the card is shown, and again when you apply, every value is checked:

Industry must match one of your industries — its name, its key or a synonym (LinkedIn's "Computer Software" is your Software, say); anything else is left out.
Employees must be a whole number. A range such as 201–500 is shown as the range, marked ≈, and saved as its middle, rounded.
Annual revenue is kept only when the page states it in US dollars: the field has no currency, so a figure in any other currency, or with no currency at all, is left out rather than converted. A range is left out too.
Description is plain text of at most 1,000 characters, preferably from the company's own site.
Logo must be a real image of up to 1 MB, at most 2,048 pixels on a side. It's saved as a PNG, so only the picture is kept. An SVG is converted to a PNG, so nothing inside it can run; an SVG that can't be converted is left out, and the Not used note says so.
Website is saved as https:// followed by the domain. A LinkedIn, Wikipedia or Crunchbase page, a social network or a free email domain isn't the company's own website, so it's left out. If that domain already belongs to another of your organizations, the website is left out and the card notes a possible duplicate.
LinkedIn must be a company page (linkedin.com/company/…), never a person's profile.
Headquarters city is kept as text, and Headquarters country is saved as its two-letter code — Australia as AU.

A value without a source page is never used.

Applying

Apply saves the ticked values as your own edit — the same as typing them on the organization page:

If someone changed a field after the research, that field is skipped and the assistant tells you it "changed since research". A field that already has the researched value is reported "already set", so clicking twice, or applying two cards, does no harm. A value that no longer passes the checks — say its domain now belongs to another of your organizations, or its industry was removed from your list — is reported "no longer valid", and a logo the app no longer holds (after 7 days) "logo unavailable". A field that isn't a row on the card, or whose value doesn't come out the same as the card showed it, is reported "not on the card".
Journeys that start when an organization changes start, as they do for any edit (see Start a journey when an organization changes).
If the organization is synced with a CRM, the card says so — for example "Synced with Pipedrive. Applied values are sent there too." While organization sync is running, the fields you map on the Account tab are sent, as for any edit on the organization page; a field you have not mapped stays in the app only, and a later change in the CRM follows the usual sync rules (see CRM organization sync).
The research — its date, a summary, notable facts with their sources and the values you applied — is saved to the organization's memory, replacing any earlier research, even when every field you ticked was skipped (see What the assistant remembers).

The assistant then tells you what it applied, what was skipped and why, and which rows you left unticked, and the conversation carries on.

If saving fails, the card shows the error and stays open, so you can try again or skip:

When the logo couldn't be saved just then, the card says nothing was applied — try again.
When the card can't tell whether the research was applied (the connection dropped, say), try again: a field already applied is reported "already set", never written twice.
When the organization was merged into another or deleted after the research, the card says "This organization was merged or deleted after the research" — skip, then ask the assistant to research it again.

Skip saves nothing: no fields, no sources and nothing in the organization's memory.

If you reply in the chat instead of using the card, nothing is applied and the assistant answers what you wrote. If an Apply you clicked goes through after you replied, the values are saved all the same, and a line above the message box tells you what was applied: "The assistant wasn't told this — its question was already answered: …". If that Apply fails and the app can't tell whether anything was saved, the line says "Couldn't tell whether the research was applied — the organization's page shows what it holds." If you pick another task while Apply is running, nothing is said there: the assistant is told what was applied when you come back to this task, unless the page was reloaded first; then the card is offered again, and Apply again is safe — values already saved are reported as already set.

Where a value came from

A field you applied from research shows its source under it on the organization page — for example "Source: acme.com/about · researched 1 Nov"; hover over the link to see the sentence research quoted. The source shows only while the field still has the value research found: edit the field and the source disappears, with nothing for you to clear.

When the assistant asks which company you mean

Research needs an organization record. If the company isn't one of your organizations yet, the assistant offers to create it first, and creates it only when you agree; if two of your organizations match the name, it asks which one you mean.

If more than one company on the web could be the one you mean, the assistant asks you which — for example acme.com or acme.io — and researches the one you pick. When the organization already has a website or a domain, research uses it to find the right company, and it never mixes in a company with a similar name.

When nothing is found

If research can't find anything reliable, there's no card: the assistant says so and tells you what it tried. It leaves a field empty rather than guess. If everything research found is already on the organization, there's no card either — the assistant tells you nothing needed changing. If the web couldn't be searched or read, the assistant says so and offers to try again later.

Limits and cost

Each research uses at most 6 web searches and 10 page loads — every page it opens counts as one, however it reads it. It counts against your AI credits like the assistant's other web research, and there's no separate setting for it. When your credits have run out, you get the usual message and nothing changes.

FAQ

Q: Can the assistant change an organization's details on its own? A: Not through research. Research only proposes; the values are written when you click Apply, as your edit.

Q: Can I research many organizations at once, or on a schedule? A: Not yet. Research runs in a session, one organization at a time — ask about several and the assistant researches them one after another, each on its own card. A routine, an automation or a journey can't research an organization.

Q: Why is a value I expected missing from the card? A: Research couldn't find it with a source, the organization already has that value, or it was left out — the Not used note says why.