AI Criteria let you go beyond standard filters to qualify leads with custom, natural-language conditions, checked automatically by Topo's AI agent against every lead in your search.

This article covers best practices gathered by the Topo team to get the best out of your AI Criteria.

Prompting Best Practices

How you phrase your AI Criteria matters. Here are guidelines to get the most accurate results.

Since AI criteria verify the prompt via internet search, your prompt should be oriented towards commanding the agent to verify a specific condition.

Start with a verb

Topo already knows whether your criteria applies to a company or a contact (based on the toggle). So write your prompt as if you're completing the sentence "This company/contact..."

• ✅ "is a B2B company"

• ✅ "has a website where users can directly purchase goods"

• ✅ "does not offer services"

Use one AI Criteria for OR conditions

If a lead should match either of two conditions, combine them in a single AI Criteria.

Example: You want companies that manufacture either pens or rulers. → Write one AI Criteria: "offers either of: pens, rulers" or “sells at least one between pens or rulers”.

Use separate AI Criteria for AND conditions

If a lead must match both conditions, add them as two distinct AI Criteria filters. Only leads validated by every AI Criteria will be imported into your list.

Example: You want companies that manufacture both pens and rulers. → AI Criteria 1: "produces pens" → AI Criteria 2: "produces rulers"

This works because Topo treats multiple AI Criteria as an AND — a lead must pass all of them to make it into the list.

Fact-checking

When you will run AI Criteria on your preview audience, you will see one (or more) additional columns populated with the marks ✅ for leads that satisfy the criterion, or ❌ for those that don’t.

However, these will appear even if the prompt is poorly formulated. If you’d like to check whether the AI’s validation is actually correct, you can move your cursor over the validation mark for each lead. A tooltip will appear with the final judgment and a few sources.

To inspect this further, you can click on the lead’s name. A side-peek view with the lead’s details will then appear. There you will find the section “Criteria evaluations”, displaying for each criterion the validation conclusion, and the sources used. You can also inspect each source directly by clicking on the available links

Quick Reference