Research for quotes and suppliers
Direct answer
Supplier research means an agent lists pages that state a price, and you open every link before a number reaches a customer. A prospect brief is a different job: public pages you opened, then a short note. Grok covers suppliers. ChatGPT covers the brief. A figure with no page is not a price.
For quotes that depend on materials, subcontractors, or software you do not buy every week. Estimates from a model are not prices.
The dangerous output is a tidy table of prices that are not on any page you can open. A useful research assistant cites the sentence and the URL, and writes "not published" when the page is silent.
A supplier page is not a contract, and a Companies House lookup is not the Construction Industry Scheme. Know which decision you are actually making.
A note on a business you might contact, built only from pages you opened, is the lead brief. It is not a price list.
Playbooks
- Research for quotes and suppliersGrok15 minutes to save the prompt, then the time you spend checking linksabout £0–£23/mo
A Grok research brief for supplier quotes
Give Grok a fixed brief for supplier research: three companies, their websites, and a price only when that price is printed on the page you are given. Open every link before you trust a figure or put it in a quote. Estimates are not allowed. Not live-tested yet.
- Research for quotes and suppliersChatGPTOne sitting per company, with the sites open£0 on the free plan/mo
A one-page lead brief from pages you opened
A lead brief is a short note on a company you are about to contact, built only from pages you opened. Companies House lists some company details for free. ChatGPT may arrange those notes and must mark anything without a page. It does not replace the supplier-quote guide. This has not been live-tested.
Questions
Can I paste the answer into a quote?
Only after you have opened the supplier page and checked the unit, the date, and the delivery. The research playbook is the search. The quote playbook is the document you send.
What about Companies House or CIS?
The research guide mentions them as things the model must not invent. CIS and company checks are your job or your accountant's, from the official site.
Is Grok the only research tool?
It is the one with a playbook. The method, cite then open, is the part that transfers if you use another chat product.