Creating a Search Agent

A Search Agent tells Alva what to go and find. You describe what you’re looking for, and the agent works through the search automatically, importing matches into your CRM ready for outreach.

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Choose how you want to search

When you click Create New Search Agent (under Discovery → Search Agents), you first choose how to search. There are three options:

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Two ways to find companies

If you choose Find companies, a toggle lets you pick the right engine for your target: The rest of this page covers the Local & service businesses engine.

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What an area-based Search Agent needs

• Profile type — what kind of relationship these companies are (customers, vendors, partners, suppliers, or competitors). See Profile Types Explained.
• Description — a natural language description of your ideal target
• Geography — which regions, countries, or cities to search in
• Match threshold — how closely a company needs to match to be included

Alva uses your description to work out what to search for, then systematically works across your chosen geography to find matching companies.

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Step 1: Choose your profile type

Select one of the five profile types:

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Step 2: Describe what you’re looking for

Write a short, natural language description of the type of company you’re looking for. Keep it to 1–2 sentences (50 words max). The key principle: describe what the company IS, not what it needs or why it would buy from you. Alva finds companies by reading what a company says about itself on its own website — so your description should match the kind of language a company would use on its own About page. Broader is better. A broader description finds more companies — you can always filter and refine the results later. An overly specific description will reject most companies, even good prospects. When you enter your description, Alva runs a validation check that flags any criteria that can’t be matched — such as pain points, technology needs, or employee counts — and suggests an improved version.

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Step 3: Choose your geography

Select the regions and locations to search across. Alva’s database covers over 4.3 million locations worldwide. You can select:

• Entire countries
• Regions (e.g. South East England, California)
• Individual cities or towns

Alva spreads its search across your chosen locations rather than concentrating on one area, so results come through with good geographic diversity.

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Step 4: Review categories

After you submit your description, Alva works out the specific categories it will search for. You’ll see these listed on the Search Agent page and can:

• Delete individual categories that don’t look right
• Re-extract categories if you’ve updated your description
• Reset to draft to start over

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Step 5: Choose who to enrich

Tell enrichment who to find at each matched company — the job functions to prioritise and your ideal economic buyer — in the People section. You can also opt into deeper contact sourcing. See Enrichment.

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Search Agent statuses

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Activating a Search Agent

Once you’re happy with the description, categories, and geography, click Activate to start the search. Alva begins finding companies immediately. Activation is what starts spending credits — creating a draft agent doesn’t.

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How searching works

When you activate an area-based agent, Alva searches across your chosen geography automatically in the background — you don’t need to do anything. You can watch progress on the Search Agent detail page, including how many searches have run and the overall completion percentage. Alva works through your geography systematically, spreading results across locations rather than exhausting one area before moving to the next.

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Managing active Search Agents

From the Search Agent detail page, you can:

• Pause — temporarily stop searching (useful if you need to review results before more come in)
• Resume — restart a paused agent
• Edit — change the description or settings (while in draft)
• Delete — remove the agent and all its results
• Adjust match threshold — change how strictly companies need to match
• Adjust throttle speed — control how fast searches run
• Toggle auto-import — automatically import high-confidence matches into your CRM

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Per-company billing

Each company discovered uses credits from your balance. The cost per company decreases at higher volumes — the more you discover, the less each company costs. You can see your discovery costs broken down in Settings → Usage. For current pricing, visit Settings → Billing or alvahq.com.