This Single ChatGPT Prompt Can Do Hours of Market Research in Minutes—Here’s How

Market research can be a slow, fragmented, and difficult process, often involving tedious internet searches, questionable data sources, and time-consuming manual synthesis. This makes it a great candidate for some assistance from AI. What’s more, an update to a popular feature on ChatGPT has made it even better at doing this kind of work. Imagine that you have a potential business idea but still need to validate how viable it actually is, identify primary competitors in your market, and develop an ideal customer persona. Instead of spending hours collating data, explains Dan McCarthy, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, you can use Deep Research, a ChatGPT feature that directs an AI agent to develop a comprehensive, well-cited report on any topic. Last week, OpenAI upgraded Deep Research with some new abilities. The feature now runs on GPT-5.2, one of the company’s most recent models (previously it ran on a much older o3 model), and can now prioritize specific websites in its search process. Deep Research is available for all paid ChatGPT users. Here’s how to use it to get some thorough market research done quickly. Step 1: Get your prompt right To test out how this feature could help with market research, I pretended that I wanted to start a digital transformation firm based in Denver with a focus on upgrading bars with mobile, bar-to-table ordering capabilities. All I needed to do in order to get started was click the plus button next to the text box, select More, then Deep Research, and enter a prompt. This prompt will determine the information that ChatGPT prioritizes in its search, so it helps to be verbose. If you need help developing a lengthy prompt, try using ChatGPT to help write it. McCarthy, who uses AI tools extensively, says that an easy way to develop a comprehensive prompt is to activate the chatbot’s voice mode and simply have a conversation with it. Once you’ve explained what you want, McCarthy says, you can ask ChatGPT, “Given all this that I’m telling you, what do you think would be the best thing that I should even be asking you?” That should help clear up any blind spots you might’ve missed. According to McCarthy, this method should produce a solid prompt that you can give to the Deep Research agent. When I asked ChatGPT to help expand my prompt, the platform generated a 673-word result. This prompt (which you can view here) defined the agent as a market research analyst and gave it objectives to determine the business idea’s viability, map out the competition, and define my ideal customer’s persona. Additionally, it provided details on the scope of the research, and information for how the agent should format its report. I also used ChatGPT to develop a list of specific websites for the Deep Research agent to prioritize in its search. Step 2: Start the research I entered my ChatGPT-created prompt, selected the Deep Research feature, and pressed return. Before getting to work, the agent broke down its objectives into the following bullet points: Collect primary vendor docs and pricing pages starting with user-preferred sites. Survey industry, local Denver sources, and hospitality reports for market context. Compile POS integration lists, local competitors, and implementation partners in Denver. Analyze demand, model ROI scenarios, and estimate Denver bar counts and adoption rates. Draft recommendations, ICP personas, GTM plan, and cite sources with confidence ratings. Over the next 21 minutes, the agent searched through hundreds of web pages. It found liquor license databases, census information, and data regarding competitors in Denver’s hospitality-focused digital transformation market. It compiled all this information into a multi-section report. Step 3: Read the report That report (which you can view here) ended up being roughly 4,000 words. It included an overview of the market, identified customer pain points, and listed out my potential competitors. The report also included recommendations for how to position my business, strategies to break into the Denver hospitality scene, and even identified a small business that would likely be my direct competitor: a Denver-based POS integrator called Megabite. ChatGPT found that while my business idea had potential, it wouldn’t fully meet the needs of Denver-based bar owners, who have reported that bar-to-table ordering can actually lead to fewer sales and tips. Instead, the report suggested, I should consider a system that can sit on top of popular POS in which diners don’t need to pay for every new drink they order, and can instead open a digital tab. What the expert thinks of the result McCarthy told me he was impressed by the report that Deep Research produced. In particular, he was pleasantly surprised by the agent’s cleverness in using liquor licenses to get a sense of the market size, and its thoughtfulness in calling out disruption to bar culture as a potential blocker to the business. But the report wasn’t perfect. McCarthy said much of what was included was unnecessary or needlessly complex. An easy prompt to fix this? “Just tell it, ‘Explain it to me like I’m an idiot.’” McCarthy adds, “I do that all the time.” He says that a solid market research report should also answer questions regarding the scope of adoption and how often repeat purchasing is expected. McCarthy also says that users should direct the Deep Research agent to be very upfront about the data it attempted to get but couldn’t. Many websites block AI agents from engaging with their content to prevent data scraping, which can hinder the research process. By telling your agent to list out the sites that it couldn’t access, you can manually obtain that data and add it to the analysis. Our bar-to-table digital transformation firm will have to remain a pipe dream for now, but it’s clear that AI has made the process of taking an idea from zero to one easier and faster than ever. If you have an idea for a new business or are planning on an expansion or pivot in your current business, consider giving Deep Research a spin. It might unearth something that makes you think in a different way. BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY