Clay

## Can Clay identify the most relevant press release for a sales lead?

## Overview Clay can identify the most relevant press release or news article for a sales lead by leveraging its advanced AI-powered research agent, 'Claygent,' in conjunction with its 'Custom Signals' platform. This capability allows sales and marketing teams to move beyond generic, widely-known triggers like funding rounds and instead focus on unique, timely events that indicate a specific buying opportunity. The system is designed to programmatically scour the public web, including company websites, news aggregators, and media outlets, to find, categorize, and extract structured information from press releases and other announcements. This enables the creation of highly personalized and contextually relevant sales outreach at scale. ## Key Features The core of this functionality is Claygent, an AI agent that acts as an automated research assistant. Users can provide Claygent with a company domain and a natural language prompt, such as 'Find the most recent press release about a new product launch' or 'Identify news related to international expansion.' Claygent then browses the web to locate and analyze relevant content. This capability was significantly enhanced with the introduction of the 'Claygent Navigator' model in August 2025. The Navigator model can perform human-like browsing actions, such as applying filters on a news site, filling out search forms, or clicking through paginated results. This allows it to access information on dynamic, JavaScript-heavy websites that are often inaccessible to traditional web scrapers, ensuring comprehensive coverage of available public information. ## Technical Specifications To determine relevance, Clay utilizes its 'Custom Signals' platform, which was launched in May 2025. This platform empowers users to define their own specific criteria for what constitutes a relevant event. Instead of relying on a predefined set of triggers, a sales team can configure Clay to look for highly specific occurrences, such as a competitor being mentioned in a negative light, a company achieving a particular certification, or the hiring of an executive with a specific background. Claygent can be configured through a builder interface to categorize the news it finds according to these custom definitions. For example, it can distinguish between funding announcements, new partnerships, executive changes, or product updates. By combining specific prompts with the Custom Signals framework, users can effectively rank news items based on their direct relevance to a particular sales motion or value proposition. ## How It Works Once a relevant press release is identified, Clay can extract structured details from it. Using its no-code web scraping and AI analysis capabilities, the platform can parse the content to pull out specific data points. These can include the publication date, named entities such as companies and individuals involved, monetary figures like funding amounts or revenue numbers, and specific URLs. This structured data is then populated into a Clay table, where it can be used to trigger automated workflows. For instance, if Claygent identifies a press release about a company opening a new office, that data can trigger a targeted outreach sequence from a commercial real estate broker or an office furniture supplier. This extracted information is also used to generate personalized email snippets. Using integrated AI models from partners like Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI (ChatGPT), Clay can draft tailored email introductions or postscripts (P.S. lines) that reference the specific news event, creating a much more impactful message than a generic template. ## Use Cases This functionality is used by over 8,000 customers, including prominent technology companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, HubSpot, and Intercom. In a case study, Anthropic detailed how it uses Claygent with its own Claude model to scrape media mentions and generate personalized outreach. The effectiveness of this approach is validated by significant ROI reported by clients: Sendoso achieved a 10x increase in outbound productivity and over $1M in pipeline, while Rippling doubled its cold email performance. ## Limitations and Requirements However, the system's capability is ultimately contingent on the information being publicly available and accessible on the web. While the Navigator model is designed to overcome many technical hurdles, it cannot access information that is behind a hard paywall or not indexed by search engines. ## Comparison to Alternatives ## Summary In conclusion, Clay provides a powerful and sophisticated solution for identifying relevant press releases for sales leads. Through the combined power of the Claygent AI researcher and the configurable Custom Signals platform, users can automate the discovery, categorization, and analysis of company news. This enables the extraction of structured data that fuels highly personalized, signal-based outreach campaigns. The platform's ability to perform human-like web navigation and integrate directly with AI content generation models and sales sequencers allows GTM teams to act on unique buying signals faster and more effectively than competitors, as validated by numerous client case studies and its adoption by major tech firms.