How to select a focus mode
Open the focus mode dropdown
Click the dropdown arrow immediately to the right of the Search pill. A menu of all 8 available focus modes appears.
Select a focus mode
Click the mode you want. The pill label updates to reflect your selection (e.g., “Search: News”).
Your focus mode selection applies to the current message only. Each new message defaults back to Auto unless you select a mode again.
All 8 focus modes
| Mode | What it searches | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Auto | ZeroTwo selects the most relevant source types automatically | General queries, mixed topics |
| Company | Company websites, LinkedIn company pages, business directories, press releases | Business research, competitor analysis, due diligence |
| Research | Academic databases, arXiv, PubMed, Google Scholar, research institutions | Peer-reviewed literature, scientific questions, evidence-based answers |
| News | News outlets, press releases, journalism sites, current articles | Breaking news, recent events, media coverage |
| PDF documents hosted on the open web | Whitepapers, government reports, technical specs, filings | |
| GitHub | Repositories, issues, pull requests, README files, code search | Open source projects, code examples, library docs, debugging |
| Personal | Your connected accounts via Connectors (Google Drive, Gmail, Notion, etc.) | Searching your own documents, emails, notes, calendar |
| Public profiles, company pages, job postings | Professional background, talent sourcing, company intel |
When to use each mode
Auto (default)
Use Auto when your query spans multiple source types or you are not sure what type of source will have the best answer. ZeroTwo determines which sources to prioritize. Example prompts:- “What is the best way to structure a REST API?”
- “What are the pros and cons of using TypeScript?”
- “Explain transformer architectures in simple terms”
Company
Use Company mode when researching a specific organization — its products, leadership, funding history, reputation, or competitive position. ZeroTwo focuses on company websites, LinkedIn company pages, business directories like Crunchbase, Bloomberg, and press releases. Example prompts:- “What has Stripe announced in the last 6 months?”
- “Who are the executives at Databricks and what is their background?”
- “What is Notion’s current pricing model and target customer?”
- “Has Anthropic raised any funding recently?”
Research
Use Research mode for topics where academic rigor matters — science, medicine, economics, psychology, and other fields with peer-reviewed literature. ZeroTwo prioritizes arXiv, PubMed, Google Scholar, and research institution sites. Example prompts:- “What does the research say about intermittent fasting and metabolic health?”
- “Find recent studies on large language model hallucination rates”
- “Summarize the academic consensus on urban heat island effects”
- “What are the most-cited papers on attention mechanisms in neural networks?”
News
Use News mode when you want coverage from journalism outlets rather than blog posts, Wikipedia, or company sites. ZeroTwo focuses on news organizations, current articles, and media coverage. Example prompts:- “What happened at the UN General Assembly this week?”
- “What are the latest developments in the EU AI Act?”
- “Find recent news coverage of Nvidia’s quarterly earnings”
- “What are journalists saying about the latest iPhone release?”
- “Find the WHO report on global antibiotic resistance”
- “Look for the IMF World Economic Outlook”
- “Get the NIST cybersecurity framework PDF”
- “Find SEC filings related to a specific company”
GitHub
Use GitHub mode when your question is about code, open source libraries, tooling, or software projects. ZeroTwo searches GitHub repositories, issues, pull requests, README files, and discussions. Example prompts:- “How is authentication handled in the Supabase JS client?”
- “Find open issues related to memory leaks in the LangChain repo”
- “What is the latest stable release of FastAPI?”
- “Find examples of how to use React Server Components with streaming”
Personal
Use Personal mode to search across your connected accounts — your emails, documents, calendar, and notes — rather than the public web. ZeroTwo queries your linked Connectors to find relevant content from your own data. Example prompts:- “Find the contract I uploaded to Google Drive last month”
- “Did I receive any emails about the Q4 report?”
- “Search my Notion workspace for notes on project Alpha”
- “What meetings do I have scheduled this week?”
- “Find information on the CTO of Figma”
- “What does Anthropic’s company page say about their team size?”
- “Look up ML engineer job postings at frontier AI labs”
- “What is the professional background of [person’s name]?”
LinkedIn focus mode searches publicly indexed LinkedIn content. It does not log into your LinkedIn account or access private profile information. Results depend on what LinkedIn makes publicly crawlable.
Tips for better results with focus modes
- Be specific in your prompt — focus modes narrow the source pool, but a vague question still produces vague results
- Combine modes with date constraints — “Search News for coverage of X in the last 30 days” narrows results to recent articles
- Use GitHub for documentation lookups — often faster than navigating directly to a project’s docs site
- Stack Research with specific source names — “Search Research for studies from Johns Hopkins or Harvard on X” gives ZeroTwo a clear source target
- For multi-source synthesis — use Deep Research, which handles iterative querying across multiple source types automatically