Building Bridges

Overview

Bridges are created by Search Agents that you configure. When configuring a Search Agent, you provide inputs on the set of accounts you’d like the Agent to search over, the types of relevant signals it should look for, and you can give scoring guidance on what makes a good signal. Once you set the Search Agent live, it will continuously scrape the web looking for new signals that match your criteria.

Bridges are the resulting set of relevant signals that the Search Agent found for you. Once you have a bridge with signals populated, you can add enrichment columns to do further analysis on the signals found.

This Help Center article describes how to configure Search Agents for bridges, and how to further enrich your bridges with additional columns.

Who can build Bridges?

Only builders and admins can create bridges, and they have access to all bridges within your organization.

Consumers can only view bridges that have been shared with them.

See user roles for more information.

Creating a Bridge

There are two main ways to create a bridge within Starbridge

1. From bridge use case templates
   
2. From “Explore” in Signals sidebar
   

Our recommended entry point for bridge creation is from the Bridge use case templates since it’s a more guided experience based on the use case you have in mind.

Configuring your Search Agent

There are two ways to configure your Search Agent:

1. Describing your ideal signals using natural language
2. Building your criteria with manual filters and search terms

Building a Search Agent using Natural Language

This type of Search Agent configuration is available for meeting, RFP, purchase, and conference Bridges.

The three phases of bridge building

1. Describe — Enter a natural language description of what you’re trying to find.
2. Refine — Review the structured search Starbridge generated for you. Edit buyer filters, bridge filters, search phrases, and match score criteria. Preview scored results.
3. Create — When the preview looks right, create the bridge.

Phase 1: Describe what you’re looking for

From the bridge creation entry point (for example, Create Bridge on the Meetings, RFPs, or Purchases page), you’ll land on a single input that asks you to describe your search in natural language.

The more specific you are, the better the structured search will be. A good prompt typically includes:

• Who you’re looking at — the type of buyer, geography, size, or segment
• What you’re looking for — the topic, keyword, product category, or signal type
• Timeframe you’re interested in – things like “meetings in last 3 months”, or “RFPs due in the next 6 months”
• What “good” looks like — the conditions that make a result worth acting on (e.g., “actively evaluating alternatives,” “contracts expiring within 12 months,” “budget already allocated”)

A strong example: K–12 school districts in California serving more than 15,000 students discussing new math curriculum in the last 12 months, prioritizing districts evaluating vendors or forming pilot committees.

You can skip the natural language input and jump straight to manually configuring filters and search phrases if you prefer - the button to do so is on the same screen.

Phase 2: Refine search and match criteria

After you submit your prompt, Starbridge analyzes it and generates a structured search draft. You’ll see a short animation while we break your query into filters, phrases, and scoring criteria - then the full Search and match criteria view opens for review.

The structured search has four components. Each one is visible, editable, and independently tunable.

Buyer filters

Defines who you’re searching over. This controls the set of buyers whose signals are eligible to appear in the bridge.

You can define buyer filters in one of three ways:

• Buyer lists — Use a pre-configured list or territory
• Buyer filters — Filter by geography, buyer type, size, classification, and other structured attributes
• Select buyers — Pick individual buyers by name

When Starbridge generates buyer filters from your prompt, we use attribute-based filters rather than pre-configured lists — that way, you can see exactly which attributes we selected and modify as needed.

Buyer filters apply to all supported bridge types except Conferences.

Bridge filters

Filters specific to the signal type you’re searching. These are the structured fields native to the document itself — for example:

• Meetings and strategic plans — meeting type, date range, meeting body
• RFPs — RFP status, due date, issuer type
• Purchases — contract type, purchase type, effective and expiration dates, total value

Search phrases

Defines what you’re searching for - the specific phrases used to surface candidate signals from the document corpus.

You can further add, edit, or remove search phrases to refine your search intent.

A few things to know:

• Starbridge generates phrases proactively to make your search comprehensive. If a generated phrase doesn’t match your intent, delete it.
• For Meetings bridges, you can add up to 30 phrases to cast a wider net and improve accuracy.
• Auto-generate additional similar search phrases by using the “Add similar search phrases and keywords” option or by hovering over a specific search phrase and clicking the “+” button to generate additional phrases similar to that specific phrase
• Cast the net wide here, filter hard in scoring. Search phrases control which signals are evaluated for your bridge; match score criteria control which signals eventually make it into the bridge.

Match score threshold

Set a minimum match score — any signal scoring below it is excluded from the bridge entirely. Moving the threshold up is the fastest way to tighten a noisy bridge; moving it down is how you open it up if you’re missing results you expected to see.

You can also toggle the preview between All signals, Above threshold, and Below threshold to see what you’re excluding and sanity-check that the threshold is set where you want it.

To adjust the logic used to produce match scores, see “Match score criteria” section below.

Match score criteria

Defines what counts as a strong match. This is where you translate “a result I’d actually act on” into criteria Starbridge can apply to every potential signal.

Write criteria as discrete statements under two headings:

• What makes a strong match — Criteria that define a good result (e.g., “Discusses an active evaluation or pilot,” “Mentions a named vendor under consideration”)
• Red flags - penalize or exclude — Criteria that weaken or exclude a signal (e.g., “Passing mention only, not the focus of the meeting,” “Historical reference with no current activity”)

Previewing your bridge results

Each result in the preview includes:

• The signal itself — the meeting, RFP, or purchase that matched
• A match score — the score for that result against your criteria
• A match reasoning — why that result received the score it did, tied directly to your match score criteria
• Summarized relevance — a longer plain-language summary of why this signal matters (Meetings only in v0; expanding to other bridge types)

You can view your bridge preview results in a table format or in a feed card format, depending on your preference.

Iterate until the preview looks right. Common moves:

• Seeing irrelevant results? Add a disqualifier to your scoring criteria, or raise the threshold.
• Missing results you expected? Add a search phrase, widen a buyer filter, or lower the threshold.
• Scores feel off but results are correct? Tune the scoring criteria to ensure that different factors increase / decrease match scores appropriately 

Anytime you change filters, phrases, or criteria, you’ll be prompted to refresh your preview to see the latest results.

Phase 3: Create the bridge

When the preview matches what you want, click Save search as bridge.

Your bridge is created with every existing signal that matches your criteria (which may include more signals than the bridge preview). Starbridge will to surface and add new relevant signals automatically as they appear. You can further enrich signals by adding columns to the bridge — contacts, CRM data, AI analysis, web agents, and more.

Every bridge created through this flow includes three default columns:

• Match score
• Score explanation
• Summarized relevance

These are added to the bridge by default and are visible to both builders and consumers, so anyone acting on a signal can quickly see why it was surfaced.

Editing a bridge after creation

You can edit any part of the structured search after the bridge is created — buyer filters, bridge filters, search phrases, and match score criteria are all editable from the bridge’s settings.

What you cannot edit after creation is the original natural language prompt. If you want to start over with a fundamentally different intent, duplicate the bridge and start a new search — this is intentional, to prevent silent drift between the prompt and the structured search it generated.

Edits to scoring criteria rescore existing results; edits to filters or search phrases may surface entirely new results or drop existing ones.

Tips for a good search

A few patterns that consistently produce better bridges:

• Start broad, tighten with scoring. Generate a wide candidate set through search phrases, then use match score criteria to filter down to what’s actionable. Resist the urge to over-constrain phrases.
• Write disqualifiers, not just strong-match criteria. Naming what shouldn’t be in the bridge is often faster than describing every nuance of what should.
• Preview before creating. The preview is there specifically so you can catch problems before they turn into a cluttered bridge.
• If you’d describe the ideal result out loud, write that down as the prompt. Don’t translate it into keyword-speak — the whole point of the new flow is that you don’t have to.

Building a Search Agent using Filters & Search Terms

Define your buyer set

You can define your buyer set in one of three ways:

• Buyer lists — Use a pre-configured list or territory
• Buyer filters — Filter by geography, buyer type, size, classification, and other structured attributes
• Select buyers — Pick individual buyers by name

Perform Bridge-specific configuration

Different Bridge types have different configuration setups. Please see the articles below for a deepdive on configuring your Search Agent for the different Bridge types:

Enriching Contacts: Contact Bridges

Tracking Job Changes

Custom Web Signal Bridges

Account Scoring || Buyer Bridge

Choose your Bridge name and description

Bridge descriptions clarify the purpose of a Bridge and how it should be used. Adding a description makes it easier for you and your team to understand what a Bridge is tracking when viewing it later. Create a new Bridge and navigate to the Edit Bridge view Or open an existing Bridge and select “Add description”.

Sharing Bridges with Consumers

After you create a bridge and finish customizing the consumer view, you’ll need to share it with consumers before they can see it. Consumers can only access bridges that have been shared with them. Once a bridge is shared, they’re automatically subscribed to it, though they can still manage their feed and subscriptions at any time. You can share a bridge with consumers in two ways:

1. Share a bridge with specific users
2. Share a bridge with teams

Sharing a bridge with specific users

This can be done using the “Share” option on the bridge page itself, in addition to from the Users management page within Organization settings.

Sharing a bridge with teams

You can also share a bridge with teams (groups of users) to make it easy to share with multiple users at once. To do so, you can utilize the “Share” button on the bridge page (similar to above), or from the “Teams” page within organization Settings.

Only admins can create teams and add or remove users from teams.

Sharing a signal with specific users

Anyone—admin, builder, or consumer—can click the “Send” icon in the top right of a signal card to copy a link to their clipboard. Any user in the Starbridge account can open that link to view the signal, even if the bridge isn’t shared with them. However, they can only see additional bridge results if the bridge has been shared with them.