Search tuning

Three sections of the admin dashboard shape how search behaves inside your community: Tags (under Member profiles) boost the right people in searches scoped to your community, and under Search and AI, Permissions decide which profiles members can find and Context gives the AI background knowledge about your community.

Tags

The Tags section defines named tags you can assign to members (from the People section's Manage Tags) to boost their visibility in search. The boost applies to searches scoped to this community — in the app, or from a chat bot acting on this community — whenever tag definitions exist (the section's help text still mentions short or ambiguous queries; that restriction no longer applies). Two paths never see it: a bot search across all your communities, which carries no community scope and so skips the community-ranking stage entirely, and the public API and MCP server, whose search path shares the retrieval step but never loads tag definitions. Results on those paths are unboosted. Within your community, a question in the app that names nothing but its filters, such as people working at Sanofi, is usually answered with the plain list of who the filters keep (when they keep fewer than 100 people), with no match scores and so no boost either.

Each tag has a Tag Name (for example PhD Student, Core Faculty, AIV 09-10), a Boost percentage, a Description that helps the AI understand queries like "team leaders" or "2020 graduates", and Search aliases — auto-generated synonyms you can regenerate or edit. Tag families group tags that belong together, as in a CRM (roles, areas of expertise, sectors): Add family makes one, and a tag in none is listed under Other tags. To put tags in a family, select them and choose Move to family: pick a family, or New family… to name one on the spot, which creates it and moves the tags into it. The same menu opens from a tag's family in the Family column and from its own menu, to move one tag to another family, and Remove from family sends tags back to Other tags. These moves save at once and say where the tags went; a family changed in a tag's Family field waits for Save tags like its other details. Bulk tools let you Merge tags, Delete Selected, and Generate description for several tags at once, and each tag's own menu has Delete. Deleting tags, Generate description and the Move to family moves save the whole list when they finish, so any change you had not saved yet is saved with them, and while any tag has an error (a tag with no name, say) they save nothing at all. Merge works only on saved tags, so it is unavailable while you have unsaved changes ("Save your changes before merging tags."). Other changes wait for Save tags, and the section warns you about unsaved changes. A boost can be set from 0 to 15%.

Permissions

The Permissions section (its card reads Who members can find) controls how the AI agent surfaces member profiles to non-admin members:

• Profile visibility — All members (internal, claimable, and claimed profiles are all searchable) or Non-internal only (internal profiles are hidden from non-admin searches).
• Tag scope — Any member, or Same tags only (members can only find others who share at least one tag).

Save settings stores both. Community admins always bypass these filters and can search all profiles, and so do the owner and admins of the organization that pays for the community while they hold one of the organization's seats. The filters apply to member search in the app and through the chat bots, to the public API and MCP server, which share the app's retrieval step, and to the people suggested to members as worth meeting.

Context

The Context section has two cards. Both shape searches scoped to this community, in the app or from a chat bot acting on it. Neither reaches a bot search across all your communities, nor searches made through the public API or the MCP server, which retrieve and rerank without loading any of it. If you are tuning results an integration sees, this section is not the lever.

• AI context — a free-text description of your community, its focus areas, and anything that helps the AI answer search queries better. Save context stores it.
• Knowledge base — Upload document accepts PDF, DOCX, TXT, and MD files up to 10 MB. Text is extracted, the document is chunked and indexed, and search can draw on it when answering. Each document shows its status (Uploading, Pending, Processing, Ready, Failed, Needs review) with chunk and word counts, and can be deleted along with all its indexed chunks. A failed document offers Retry, which asks for the file again and, once the new upload has started processing, removes the failed entry.

Custom fields and search

A community's custom fields are kept out of the search index: members' profiles are indexed for search without them, so a member cannot learn who holds a private value by searching for it. A field can still narrow a search as a filter when its Use in search filters switch is on: in an admin's search, any such field; in another member's, only the fields whose values all members can see (the Custom fields page says when). Field filters apply only to a search scoped to your community, never to one across all communities or through the public API or MCP server.

New members and search

Search finds members through their indexed profiles, so a new member shows up in results once their profile has been indexed. An admin import indexes the profiles it adds as it runs; other new profiles are picked up by a background job that runs every ten minutes and takes a few hundred profiles at a time, so a large batch can take longer. When a search in your community finds nobody while members who joined in the last day are still waiting to be indexed, the answer says so.