The pattern: name the market, check the sourcing, work the list
Name the market in plain words. The trade, the town, the customer shape: "roofers within 30 miles who look like they are hiring," "med spas with a website but no online booking." Agents are good at turning a description like that into searches; your job is knowing your market well enough to describe the buyer, which you already do.
Let the agent gather signals. Each search is a tool call, and each call returns its result with a receipt attached. What you get back is not a bald list of names but signals: the business, what was found about it, and the cue that makes it a lead now rather than a directory entry.
Check before you work it. Open the receipt behind a sample of the leads and recompute it at zambo.dev/verify. The receipt proves the saved search record was not changed after the search ran. If the sourcing is solid, work the list with confidence; if a search was sloppy, you caught it at the cheapest moment, before a single awkward email.
Why the receipt matters for leads specifically
Lead work runs on trust in three directions. A prospect who asks how you found them deserves a real answer, and "an agent searched public signals on this date, here is the record" is one. A teammate picking up your market next month needs to know which searches already ran, so the same businesses are not hit twice. And your future self, reviewing which outreach actually produced customers, needs the searches as they were run, not as anyone remembers them. A receipt under each search serves all three, because it fixes the record at the moment of the search and lets anyone recompute it.
The honest boundary: a receipt proves the search happened as recorded. It does not prove a business wants your offer. Qualification is still sales judgment. The receipt just makes sure the judgment runs on the real sourcing instead of on a list nobody can explain.
From one market to every market
The hub's trade guides, roofers, electricians, remodelers, and more, all run this same loop in different markets, because the loop is the product: describe, search, verify, work. Run it daily and the searches compound into a coverage map of your market that no purchased list can match, built from live signals and kept honest by receipts. When the work outgrows the free tier, the Day Pass is $0.99 for 24 hours of metered tools, and the Pass at $29 a month covers the ongoing habit.
Questions, answered
How do I get my AI agent to find leads?
Connect the AI you already use to the Zambo endpoint (https://zambo.dev/mcp) and ask it for leads in plain words: the trade, the area, the kind of customer. The agent runs lead signal searches as tool calls and brings back signals, the businesses, sites, and buying cues it found, each call receipted. In one counted evening window on 2026-10-22, agents made 55 lead signal calls on the endpoint. The free tier covers 3 lead signal calls a day, which is enough to judge the quality on your own market before spending anything.
How is this different from buying a lead list?
A purchased list is a snapshot of someone else's research, of unknown age, sold to everyone, and impossible to audit: you cannot tell which entries are live businesses and which are residue. Agent-found signals are gathered when you ask, for the market you named, and each search leaves a receipt: what was queried, when, and what came back. If a lead looks wrong, you can check the sourcing instead of shrugging at a spreadsheet. Fresh and checkable beats bulk and stale for almost every business that works a local or trade market.
What does the receipt add to a lead?
Provenance. The receipt fixes the search and its result at the time the agent ran it, and it recomputes at zambo.dev/verify, so the record of where a lead came from cannot quietly change later. That matters when outreach is questioned (a prospect asks how you found them), when two agents or two teammates work the same market, and when you review which searches actually produced customers. The receipt proves the saved search record was not changed; whether the lead is a good prospect is still your judgment, and the receipt keeps that judgment working from the real record.
What kinds of businesses does this work for?
Any business whose customers are findable in public signals: local trades, clinics, studios, agencies, retailers, and the services around them. The hub carries worked examples by trade, from roofers and med spas to web designers, each walking the same pattern: name the market, let the agent gather signals, verify the sourcing, work the list. Start with the market you know best, because you can judge the agent's output against your own knowledge and calibrate fast.