How can I find prospects or leads, for example from Google Maps, LinkedIn or Apollo?
The AI assistant does not find leads on its own out of the box. Instead, connect a prospecting service that has an MCP server as a connector, then ask the AI to use it. This works with our AI assistant and with your own AI, such as Claude or ChatGPT, and it is more flexible than a fixed prospecting tool.
A popular option is Apify (apify.com), a marketplace of tens of thousands of user-created scrapers, called actors, with a whole lead generation category.
- In Apify, activate the actor you want, for example the Google Maps scraper.
- In the AI assistant, open Assistant settings, go to the Connectors tab and add a connector. Choose to connect an MCP server and paste what Apify tells you to paste. You may need to log in to Apify.
- Ask the assistant for what you want, for example get me all the HVAC companies on Google Maps with low reviews and add them to my CRM, or find all the chiropractors in a city with a review score below 3.5 and create a contact for each.
Each actor sets its own pricing (per scrape, per page or per result), and some give a free allowance, so check the price and the reviews before you use one. The Google Maps scraper was quoted at about $1.50 per thousand places scraped: you ask for a thousand places in a niche and then pick the ones you want. Apify also has actors for LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Reddit, Yelp, the Facebook Ads Library, and SEO, GEO and AEO score reports.
You can chain actors. For example, scrape Google Maps, run an SEO score on each business's website and keep the ones with the lowest score, find the businesses running Google or Facebook ads because they have an ad budget, or check whether each website has a chat widget. The AI assistant also has a built-in crawler that can find businesses without a website or without a chat widget. Common targets are businesses with no website, a dated website, low or few reviews, a bad SEO score, or no ads.
SERP API gives your AI Google search and Google Maps results, such as reviews, locations and contact details, so you can find businesses with bad reviews or poor websites.
Apollo provides lead data you can filter by industry and job title. It describes itself as having 240 million contacts and 30 million companies, and it is more enterprise oriented.
PhantomBuster is good for getting data from LinkedIn and other social platforms, such as members of a Facebook group, and for engagement signals. LeadsGorilla is another option.
Job sites such as Indeed show which businesses are hiring a receptionist, appointment setter or sales person, which are jobs AI can do for much less.
For simple needs, an off-the-shelf scraper is usually worth its small cost over extra work with open source tools.
A business you find this way must still give permission before you text it or call it with AI. Sending your lead magnet is a good first touch, and anyone who clicks through to your website can be identified with Visitor ID, so you can follow up in real time once they have opted in.