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This lesson covers two parts of search the main play skipped: finding local businesses, and finding companies that look like a list you already have. Both are worth knowing, because when you build with AI, knowing what's possible is what lets you prompt it to do the right thing.

🏪 Local Businesses

Start with your ICP. Clay's companies, people, and jobs dataset mostly covers corporate jobs: people in tech, and people who show up on social and professional networks. That's the root of most B2B databases.

If you sell to brick-and-mortar businesses, use local businesses instead. Think mom-and-pop shops, gas station owners, fast food franchises: businesses spread across a country or the world that a corporate database barely sees.

From Find Leads, open Local businesses. Google Maps is the source, and you can:

• Search by free-text business type
• Pick the area to search on the map

👯 Company Lookalikes

Lookalikes used to take a whole add-enrichment, write-to-table workflow. Now they're native in search.

If you're still working in a table, you can start from the table. Otherwise, start from an audience segment:

1. Open Company lookalikes in Find Leads.
2. Pick your starting companies. Here, that's the growth-only PE firms segment from the main play.
3. Set match quality. We chose More precise. The lookalike model is Clay's own, built in house.
4. Exclude what you don't want. You can exclude specific companies or a whole segment, say, one you've already worked.
5. Review the results. They come back grouped by category, and you'll see a mix, including smaller firms that still have a fair number of people.
6. Continue and save the results like any other search.

🚀 What's Next

You now know two more ways to build a list: local businesses for brick-and-mortar ICPs, and lookalikes from any segment.

Next, we'll add signals, so your segments tell you when something changes.