Motley Intelligence

Every signed-in page carries the Intelligence panel on the right. It knows your family profile, your saved research, and your deadlines, so you can ask it things in plain language instead of hunting for the right screen.

It proposes; you confirm

This is the part worth knowing first. Intelligence never changes anything on its own. When you ask it to save a school, update your address, or start tracking an application, it proposes the change and shows you a card spelling out exactly what will happen — including when the answer is “nothing, that’s already the case.” Nothing is written until you press Confirm, and you can cancel at any point. It also can’t report back that it did something it didn’t; it only sees the real result of your confirm.

The opening rundown

When you open the panel it starts with a short, factual briefing — what’s overdue or due this week, unread news from your monitors, and any fresh research on your saved places — plus a couple of suggested follow-ups. That rundown is assembled directly from your data, not generated, so opening the panel costs you nothing and tells you nothing made up. If there’s nothing to report, the panel stays quiet.

What you can ask (free)

• About a neighborhood— “what’s Ditmas Park like for us?” It reads our scores and gives a fit verdict against your family.
• About what you’ve saved — a summary of your saved schools, neighborhoods, and places.
• About an admissions method — what it means, and what it actually asks of a family (an audition portfolio, an SHSAT ticket, an open-house sign-in).
• Find a school by name — it resolves to the real record so nothing gets confused with a similarly named school.
• Browse by what you want— “Brooklyn middle schools with a strong arts program.” It filters by borough, district, grade band, school type, admissions method, and program focus (arts, STEM, language, sports, academics, clubs).
• What’s due — the same briefing, on demand.
• Your zoned school — worked out from the home address on your profile.

What it can do for you (free)

Each of these ends in a confirmation card:

• Save or unsave a school or a neighborhood
• Switch which family profile is active
• Update your home address
• Turn a notification on or off
• Set up your whole family profile — it gathers your children and grades, school preferences, address, priorities, and the optional details a question or two at a time, then proposes the finished profile in one go. This is the primary way in — prefer a form? The wizard covers the same ground.

What it can do with Pro

• Refine Smart Match — adjust the weights and re-run it
• Generate a PDF neighborhood report
• Start tracking a school for one of your children
• Update a tracked application — its status or its deadline

On a free account those four aren’t available to Intelligence at all — it can’t half-do them or pretend. It knows they exist, so if you ask it will tell you plainly that the tool is part of Motley Pro.

Good things to try

• “What did I save in Queens?”
• “Explain screened admissions to me.”
• “Find K-5 schools in District 15 with a language program.”
• “What’s my zoned school?”
• “Help me set up our family profile.”
• “What’s due in the next two weeks?”

A note on limits

Intelligence reads Motley’s own data. It won’t browse the wider web for you, and if a question falls outside what it can look up it’ll say so rather than guess. If you want an outside assistant to reach Motley’s public data instead, we publish an MCP server — see the MCP page.