# Discovery running in the background

Discovery does not need you watching it. A saved search keeps collecting and researching between visits, so the prospect list grows while nobody is on the screen. It draws on the same allowance an interactive run does, stops when that allowance is spent rather than queuing silently, and every pass it makes is written to the activity trail so the growth is explainable afterwards.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/prospects, #/activity
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/background-discovery/

## What actually runs when you are not there

The background pass does the same work as an interactive one — collect candidates, research them, attach evidence, qualify, resolve identity — in smaller amounts, more often. Nothing is reserved for the foreground. A prospect that appeared overnight went through the same stages and carries the same evidence as one you watched arrive.

It also re-researches. A record whose freshness has lapsed is picked up again, and claims that no longer hold are updated rather than left standing. That matters more than new discovery on an established search: a two-month-old claim about a business that has since moved, closed or rebranded is worse than no claim, because somebody will act on it.

> **Note** Background discovery and the assistant's `discover_prospects` tool reach the same service. Asking the [Connect Assistant](/docs/assistant/) to find prospects is not a separate pipeline with separate rules — it is the same chain, started by a different hand.

## What it consumes, and what stops it

Two limits govern it. The **plan allowance** bounds how much a customer workspace may spend; the Owner has no plan and no gates. The **cost router** decides, inside whatever is left, which candidates deserve the deeper pass. When the allowance is spent the pass stops and says so — it does not build a silent backlog that surprises you tomorrow.

| Limit | Set by | What you see when it binds |
|---|---|---|
| Plan allowance | The workspace's plan | Discovery pauses; the allowance and its reset are shown |
| Research depth | The cost router | Some candidates carry a shallower research record than others |
| Freshness | Record age against claim volatility | Older records are re-read before new ones are collected |
| Identity resolution | Existing people and companies | A candidate silently never becomes a cold prospect |

The Owner and a customer see the same screen with different wording, because one of them has an allowance and the other does not. If prospecting has stopped and no reason is visible, the allowance is the first thing to check — [The prospecting allowance is spent](/docs/troubleshooting/prospect-allowance/) describes what that looks like.

## Seeing what it did

Progress is not a spinner. It is the counts above the list moving and the activity trail filling in. Those counts are computed across the whole workspace rather than over a recent slice — the defect where every headline number stopped at 500 rows is documented in [The numbers above the list](/docs/prospects/prospect-counts/), and it mattered most here, because a background pass is exactly the situation where you are trusting a number instead of watching the work.

- **New organisations** — candidates collected since you last looked.
- **Contactable** — those with a sourced address, which is the count that decides whether outreach has anything to do.
- **Qualified** — those a person could reasonably approve.
- **Already contacted** — the guard against writing to the same business twice.

A run that adds organisations but not contactable ones is working correctly and telling you something: this population does not publish addresses. That is a signal to change channel or to change the trade, not a fault to report.

## Failure shapes

**Nothing new for days** — Either the population is exhausted for those criteria, or the allowance is spent. Both are visible; neither is silent.
**Counts move, list looks unchanged** — New rows are being added below your current sort or filter. Sort by newest before concluding nothing arrived.
**The same organisation keeps reappearing** — It is being collected under two published identities. Merging is a human decision, kept deliberately out of the machine's hands — see [Relationships](/docs/relationships/).
**A known customer showed up as a prospect** — Identity resolution did not match, usually because the published name differs from the one on the relationship. See [Connect refused to prospect an existing customer](/docs/troubleshooting/prospect-already-customer/) for both directions of that failure.

## Questions

### Does background discovery send anything?

No. Discovery finds and researches; sending is a separate stage governed by the channel's autonomy rule, the compliance check and sender readiness. A workspace in `ask_before_send` accumulates prospects overnight and still sends nothing without a person.

### Can I stop it without deleting the search?

Yes, and that is the usual move when an allowance is being spent on the wrong market. The prospects and their evidence stay; only the collecting stops, so restarting later does not re-buy research you already have.

### Why did an overnight pass research fewer businesses than the ones I ran myself?

Because the router spends where it can change a decision. An interactive run on twenty candidates gets deeper coverage than an overnight pass across two hundred of them, on the same money. The shallower records are not lower quality — they are records where more reading would not have changed the verdict.

## Related

- [Prospecting in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/)
- [Keeping prospect research fresh](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/prospect-freshness/)
- [The numbers above the list](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/prospect-counts/)
- [What prospecting costs](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/prospect-costs/)
- [The prospecting allowance is spent](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/troubleshooting/prospect-allowance/)
- [Connect Assistant](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/assistant/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §4 — discovery, freshness and cost routing
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §8 — the Assistant's discover_prospects tool
- `docs-source/facts.py` — CAPABILITY_STATUS billing_usage and prospect_discovery