How to do market research with AI

Before opening any tool, define exactly what you want to know. The more specific your question, the better results you’ll get from AI.

Think about these three areas and jot down what you need to know from each:

• The market: how big is it? Is it growing or shrinking? What trends dominate?
• The competition: who are the main players? What do they do well and what poorly?
• The customer: who buys? What problems do they have? What do they say about current options?

For example, instead of asking “I want to know about the healthy food market,” ask: “How much is the healthy snack market worth in Latin America in 2026 and what are the leading brands?”

That specificity changes everything.

Perplexity is like a Google that reads the results for you and summarizes them with citations. Ideal for market research because each fact comes with its source, letting you verify.

1. Go to https://www.perplexity.ai and create a free account.
2. Write your question directly, as if asking a person:

What is the size of the [your industry] market in [your region] in 2026?
What are the most important trends?

3. Read the responses and check the sources that appear on the right or below each paragraph.
4. Use the “Follow-up” button (or type a follow-up question) to dig deeper:

Which brands dominate that market? What are the most profitable segments?

5. When you have the data you’re interested in, copy the full response to a document to use later.

If the free plan limits your daily searches, come back tomorrow or use the Pro plan ($20/mo, confirm at perplexity.ai). For one-off research, the free plan is enough.

With Perplexity you can do a basic competitive analysis in minutes. Try these questions:

What are the top 5 companies in the [your industry] market in [your region]?
For each: what they offer, at what price, what their customers say,
and what they do differently.

When you have the list, open Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to compare:

Here is information about my competitors: [paste Perplexity text].
What patterns do you see? What is the industry doing well and what is it leaving unresolved?
Where might there be an opportunity?

AI won’t give you a magic answer, but it’ll help you see patterns you might miss reading them one by one.

Tip: find competitor reviews on Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Amazon or the app store. Paste 20–30 reviews into Claude and ask for a summary of the most frequent complaints. That’s gold for finding gaps in the market.

Understanding who your customer is and what problem they have is the most valuable part of market research. You can do it two ways with AI:

Option A: ask AI to build a customer profile (buyer persona)

Open ChatGPT or Claude and write:

I want to sell [your product or service] to people in [your market].
Create a detailed profile of my ideal customer: age, occupation,
what problem they have, how they solve it today, what frustrates them
about current options and what would make them switch providers.

This is a starting point, not a truth. Validate it with real conversations.

Option B: analyze real comments with AI

Collect comments from forums (Reddit, Facebook Groups, Quora), reviews or survey responses related to your industry. Paste them into Claude or ChatGPT and ask:

These are comments from people about [the problem you solve].
Group them by topic: what are the most frequent complaints?
What do they look for that they can't find? What phrases do they use
to describe their problem?

Those phrases they use are exactly the words you should use in your marketing.

When you have the data from the previous steps, ask Claude or ChatGPT to organize it into a clear report. Paste everything you gathered and use this prompt:

Here is all my market research on [your industry]:
[paste the Perplexity data, competitive analysis and customer profile]

Please organize this into a report with these sections:
1. Executive summary (5 key points)
2. Market size and trends
3. Competitive analysis (comparison table)
4. Ideal customer profile
5. Detected opportunities and gaps
6. Recommended next steps

The report AI returns is a draft. Review it, add your judgment and remove what doesn’t apply to your specific situation.

If you want to present these findings to a team or investors, check our guide How to create professional presentations with AI to turn this report into slides in minutes.

This is the step that matters most and gets skipped the most. Before making decisions with your research:

• Verify key numbers from Perplexity directly at the source it cites (one click on the link).
• Cross-check data from at least two different sources. If only one source says something, take it with caution.
• Update anything outdated: AI sometimes mixes data from different years. Check the dates.
• ChatGPT and Claude can make up figures when they don’t have concrete data. If a number seems suspicious, look it up in Perplexity or Google.

AI research is an excellent starting point, not a replacement for your judgment. You know your market better than AI does.

Problem	Fix
Perplexity can’t find data on my niche	Try in English: more data is available in that language
AI gives outdated data	Ask in the prompt to only use sources from the last 12 months
ChatGPT makes up figures that don’t exist	Use Perplexity for data; ChatGPT is better for analysis and synthesis
The report came out too generic	Give more context: where you operate, who your customer is, your budget
I ran out of Perplexity searches	Use the free version of Gemini or Claude for additional searches