There is a big difference between someone mentioning your product category and someone getting ready to buy. Keywords are great at finding the first group and useless at telling them apart from the second. If you have ever watched a broad keyword for a week, you already know the feeling: a hundred emails, and maybe three of them are people you actually want to talk to.
F5Bot's AI filtering fixes that part. You still use keywords to find the conversations, but then you hand each match to F5Bot's AI and tell it, in plain English, what a real buyer looks like. It reads the post and decides whether to bother you. The rest never lands in your inbox.
Intent lives in the phrasing, not in any single word. "I've been using Trello for years" and "I'm done with Trello, what else is out there" share most of their words, but only one of those people is shopping. No list of keywords cleanly separates them. You can get partway there with include and exclude filters, and for a lot of jobs that is enough. But "this person is about to switch" is the kind of thing you can describe in a sentence and struggle to capture with a word list.
That sentence is exactly what an AI filter wants from you.
The cheapest and most reliable way to do this is in two stages. Keywords do the
first pass, because they are fast and free to run, and the AI only looks at what
survives. You set this up with the ai= flag on an ordinary keyword
alert.
First you create an AI filter in F5Bot from the AI Filtering
dashboard and give it a name and a description. Say you name it
"pm tool leads" and describe it as: people who are frustrated with a project
management tool like Jira, Asana, or Trello and are actively asking for something
to switch to. Then you take a normal F5Bot keyword alert, something broad like
project management, and add the flag:
project management ai="pm tool leads"Now every post F5Bot sees that mentions "project management" gets forwarded to
the AI, which checks it against your description and only emails you the ones that
fit. The keyword throws a wide net for almost nothing, and you only pay for AI on
the posts that already looked promising. If a name has spaces, wrap it in quotes
like above. For a single-word name, ai=leads is fine.
F5Bot's AI has nothing to go on except the sentence you give it, so that sentence is where all your effort should go. Vague in, vague out.
Do not just restate the topic. "project management tools" tells the AI almost nothing. Describe the moment you are trying to catch instead: someone asking for a recommendation, complaining that their current tool is too expensive, or asking how to migrate off of something. Naming a couple of examples of what should match, and what should not, helps more than any amount of adjectives.
If results start slipping through that you did not want, do not throw the whole thing out. Add a line to the description that rules them out, and the next batch gets tighter. Treat it like training a new assistant. You explain what you meant, they get closer, you explain the edge case, they get closer still.
Sometimes there is no good keyword to gate on. Buyer intent in a specific subreddit can look like a hundred different phrases, none of which you can list ahead of time. For that, you can point an F5Bot AI filter straight at the sites and subreddits you care about and let F5Bot's AI read everything new that shows up.
This casts the widest net, and it also uses the most AI, since every new post and comment gets read whether it was ever going to match or not. On a busy subreddit that adds up. If a keyword can plausibly gate the topic first, the two-stage approach above will cost you far less for the same catches. Save direct monitoring for the cases where no keyword fits.
AI filtering is an F5Bot Ultra tier feature, and the AI usage is billed by how much it reads, on top of your plan. That is the honest tradeoff: it does work that keywords cannot, and it is not free to run. The pricing page has the tier details, and the AI Filtering documentation covers every option, the limits, and how billing works. The two-stage keyword approach is the main lever you have for keeping the cost sane, so reach for a keyword gate before you reach for direct monitoring.
Pick one buying signal you wish you could catch, write a sentence describing it, and wire it up in F5Bot behind a broad keyword. When you find someone, treat them like a person and not a lead: read the thread, answer what they actually asked, and mention your product only if it genuinely fits. The same care that the find customers guide talks about applies here, only now the junk never reaches you in the first place.