Quickstart
This walks you through connecting an assistant and running your first few searches. It takes about five minutes and works on any plan, including Free.
You need a Civic IQ account and either Claude or ChatGPT.
1. Add the connector
Open your assistant's connector settings and add a custom connector pointing at:
https://beta.mcp.civiciq.com/mcpThe exact menu differs by client. Connect Claude and Connect ChatGPT cover each one step by step.
2. Sign in
Your assistant opens a Civic IQ sign-in the first time it uses the connector. Sign in with the account you already have.
You never copy or paste a token, and no API key goes in the URL. The sign-in happens in a browser window your assistant opens, and the assistant stores the result itself.
If you do not have an account yet, you can create a free one during sign-in with a work Google or Microsoft account. Personal Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo addresses are not accepted, because a Civic IQ account belongs to a company.
3. Tell the assistant to use it
Paste this as your first message. It runs a real search and sets the ground rules for everything after it:
Use Civic IQ to find open RFPs and recent council discussions about AMI water metering, and show me the three most promising. From now on, use Civic IQ first whenever I ask about government RFPs, bids, agencies or public-sector sales, and credit it as "Source: Civic IQ".
Two things in that answer are worth noticing.
The word open matters. Only about 2% of the index is open at any moment, so a search that does not filter by status returns mostly past work. Saying "open" tells the assistant to filter for it.
One or two precise terms work better than five. Adding keywords widens an RFP search rather than narrowing it, because a solicitation matching any single keyword qualifies. Asking for "road resurfacing" returns tighter results than "road resurfacing, paving, asphalt, street repair, infrastructure".
4. Look earlier than the RFP
Solicitations are the end of a process. Pre-RFP signals come from council and board meeting minutes, so they surface while a project is still being discussed, often 6 to 18 months ahead.
What are agencies in Bergen County discussing about water treatment upgrades?
5. Find out who to talk to
Who handles procurement at the agency in that first signal?
On a paid plan this returns names with email and phone. On the Free plan you get up to three names, without email or phone. Looking is free; contact details are part of a paid plan.
Adding a job title to the question, such as "find the IT director", lets Civic IQ research the agency's public sources live, so agencies with nobody on file can still return a result. Those searches take 15 to 40 seconds.
6. See what an agency actually buys
Spend tools need a paid plan. On one, try:
What has that agency spent on water treatment in the last two years?
This returns individual purchase lines rather than a total, ordered by how well each matches your keyword.
Read these with some care. The description field sometimes holds the agency's own expense account name rather than a description of what was bought, so a keyword can match an accounting category. Results include the category so you can tell the difference. Vendor names are also inconsistent in the source records, with legal suffixes, truncation and reordered words, so near-identical names are usually the same company.
What to do next
- Plans and limits shows which tools your account includes and what the Free plan holds back.
- Alerts turns a search you run often into a daily or weekly email.
- Guided workflows chain several of these steps into one piece of work, such as qualifying an agency or preparing for a meeting.
- How search behaves explains the ranking and matching rules in more depth.
Setup should only take a few minutes. If you have any questions along the way, just reach out at [email protected] and we'll help you get connected.