09/22/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/22/2025 05:20
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Marketers are known for wearing many hats - writer, designer, psychologist, maybe the occasional raspberry berry - but one that often gets overlooked is researcher.
Market research is critical to knowing your audience, connecting with them, and convincing them to take action. Thankfully, today, there are countless AI market research tools to help make completing it easier, faster, and more effective.
I've tested some of the most popular to see if they really live up to the hype. Here are the seven I've found that your marketing strategy can most benefit from, and how to determine if they're right for you.
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AI tools for market research automate consumer data collection, analysis, and insight generation to help marketing and product leaders make better-informed, strategic decisions. Top AI solutions like Breeze and Crayon offer survey automation, competitive intelligence, and consumer insights AI, among other features, to make this possible.
However, choosing the right AI tool will depend on your research goals, integration needs, and budget. Many platforms offer free trials or entry-level plans to help you evaluate. Start by identifying your key research tasks, then select an AI tool that aligns with your workflow.
For a unified, scalable approach, consider platforms like HubSpot that combine AI-driven research, automation, and customer data in one place. Get started with Breeze today to accelerate your market insights and stay ahead of the competition.
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AI market research tools use artificial intelligence to automate and enhance how businesses gather, analyze, and act on consumer data. They combine machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics to transform raw information into actionable insights marketers can use to reach their audiences.
These tools pull target market data from diverse sources - social media, surveys, competitor websites, and industry reports - then use advanced algorithms to identify patterns, predict trends, and generate comprehensive reports that would take human analysts weeks to produce.
Ok, but how does this translate into our daily market research responsibilities?
• Survey automation: Design, distribute, and analyze surveys in real-time. AI can suggest questions and identify response patterns.
• Sentiment analysis: Monitor brand perception across social media, forums, and review sites to understand customer emotions toward your business.
• Competitive intelligence: Track competitor strategies, price changes, and even positioning automatically.
• Trend prediction: Analyze historical and real-time data to forecast market movements and consumer behavior shifts.
• Data visualization: Transform complex datasets into intuitive dashboards and reports highlighting key insights instantly.
• Audience segmentation: Automatically group customers based on behavior, preferences, and demographics for targeted strategies.
Can I research my market without AI? Sure. Can I analyze the facts and data and draw conclusions? Of course; I've been doing it since elementary school. But as much as I hate to admit it, I can't do any of this as fast as artificial intelligence can.
According to the 2025 Qualtrics Market Research Trends Report, 89% of researchers are already using AI-powered tools regularly or experimenting with them, and 83% of researchers plan to increase investment in AI in 2025. And with good reason.
While AI tools have limitations (such as bias in training data), their benefits for market research are undeniable.
Benefits of AI tools for market research:
HubSpot research found 90% of marketers say AI and automation help them spend less time on manual tasks. In other words, AI has significantly helped marketers work faster and do more.
For market researchers, this can mean:
"Review mining" is a great research use case for AI tools. Retail brands can use AI to aggregate product reviews from Amazon or other sources and summarize the top themes (e.g., "customers love durability but complain about packaging").
This not only gives the team language that speaks directly to their audience and tells them exactly what they need to improve, but it also enables them to focus on those tasks by freeing up their time.
Note: Once you have those sound bites from reviews, HubSpot Content Writer is perfect for saving time, overcoming writer's block, and scaling your content without extra costs. With just a few clicks, you can generate blogs, social posts, emails, and more.
In a recent study, 36% of marketers who use AI said they rely on it for data analysis and reporting, and I'm not surprised.
After gathering its data, AI can instantly predict trends, giving marketers time back to fine-tune their strategies and see results more quickly. More specifically, AI tools for market research can help with:
In a previous role, my team invested in a tool called Seventh Sense with great predictive analysis. This tool used AI to analyze how our contacts interacted with our email marketing in HubSpot and identify trends in their behavior.
It used this information to predict how contacts would act in the future and optimize our send times to get the most opens and engagement.
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In this case, the AI helped us research our target audience's behavior, and its predictive analysis gave us actionable advice on what to do next.
Without it, deeper insights, like time opened, would be a mystery. Speaking of mysteries, another benefit of AI tools for market research is…
AI tools for market research shine at spotting hidden correlations that human analysts may overlook. This includes:
Think about a food delivery service, for example. The company may use AI to analyze order data and find that customers who order vegetarian meals are more likely to tip generously. This insight helps shape promotions, driver assignments, and possibly even customer perks.
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Traditional market research is resource-intensive: the more surveys, focus groups, or interviews you run, the more people and time you need. AI breaks that limitation, especially as a company grows its output and expands its market.
With AI tools for market research, marketers can:
Let's consider an eCommerce company entering new territories. The company can deploy AI to analyze customer sentiment in other countries. It can then use Google Translate to help it translate product descriptions, messaging, and its website overall without adding new analysts to the team.
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Ultimately, like everything in business, AI in market research is about return on investment. The savings from reduced manual work, faster time-to-insight, and higher accuracy translate directly into metaphorical and tangible returns. In other words, it can mean:
But AI is not perfect.
As great as AI sounds for market research, it still has challenges.
"AI is a tool to help you work faster, not a replacement for critical thinking and problem-solving," says Alex Cattoni, Award-winning marketer and Founder of the Copy Posse. This is true greatly because of data quality concerns.
"AI tools like ChatGPT…can produce inaccurate or even harmful results," continues Cattoni. "This is known as an AI hallucination. Even tech researchers worry that people rely too heavily on these systems for important advice…"
Knowing this, you can't always know if the research results you get from AI are sound or based on reliable sources. This can be dangerous when trying to understand and cater to your audience.
I mean, the last thing you want is for AI to tell you your audience loves funny TikTok videos only to find out they actually despise them.
"Much of the data AI is trained on contains society's biases and prejudices," explains senior marketing manager at HubSpot, Flori Needle. "For example, an image generator asked to create an image of a CEO might produce images of white males because of the historical bias in employment in the data it learned from."
Unfortunately, I've seen this firsthand, and the bias is not limited to images. While there have been improvements in this in recent years, there are no guarantees that the findings presented by AI tools for market research won't contain similar stereotypes or biased assumptions.
After extensive testing and analyzing how leading brands use AI for market research, I've zeroed in on seven tools that deliver real results.
Each excels in different areas-from call analysis to social listening to competitive intelligence-so you can choose based on your specific research needs.
Top AI market analysis tools:
Let's explore what makes each tool valuable and how to leverage their unique strengths.
Looking for AI marketing tools that go beyond research? Check out our article The Top 33 AI Marketing Tools.
Gong.io is an AI tool that offers revenue intelligence and conversation analytics. It analyzes sales calls, both audio and video meeting recordings, and customer interactions to offer insights into sales processes, customer behaviors, and market trends.
Noteworthy Gong features for market research:
Pricing: Gong prices each license per user. Reach out to them to settle on a customized quote.
Best for: Gong is great for researchers and marketers who frequently hold customer calls or audience interviews.
What I like: Gong provides both contextual and referential insights. Contextual insights analyze real-time conversation details like tone and sentiment, while referential insights compare these interactions to past data, identifying patterns and best practices to improve sales outcomes.
For a market researcher, these features offer valuable insight into customer sentiment that can help with messaging, campaign development, product positioning, and product development.
I used Gong to analyze one of our company's sales calls, and the insights were incredibly good.
For instance, Gong's talk-to-listen ratio showed that the sales rep spent too much time talking and not enough listening. The tool flagged as a potential issue based on successful past conversations, which is a great reminder for future calls.
Parts of the call were color-coded, indicating different topics, emotions, or levels of engagement. It was super easy to track key moments and see when important issues were discussed or when the customer's interest dropped.
I haven't run into many issues with Gong, but the speech-to-text feature can be a bit hit-or-miss sometimes - like most similar tools these days. It usually gets the job done, but some parts require refinement. Even so, it's still one of the top tools out there for this purpose.
Exploring chatbots in your sales strategy? Try HubSpot's Free AI Chatbot Builder to book meetings and even offer 24/7 customer support.
YouScan uses AI to monitor social media and images, helping you track brand mentions, understand customer feelings, and spot trends.
It also provides real-time insights into how people view your brand. For instance, YouScan shows whether people are generally positive, negative, or neutral about your brand based on their comments or post reactions.
Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing: Starter 3 ($299 per month): 3 topics, unlimited users, and 30,000 monthly mentions. Unlimited Plans: Configured to your requirements.
Best for: Companies heavily active on social media that want to track their brand's presence and impact across platforms.
What I like: It doesn't rely solely on hashtags and captions; it identifies subjects and text in images as well. Here's how it works:
1. The AI identifies and tags visual elements in images, such as logos, objects, and scenes.
2.It extracts relevant information from these images, like how your brand's logo is used or what products are featured.
3. The tool then analyzes this data to provide insights, such as how your brand is perceived or which products are the most popular.
From here, you can use filters to narrow down the results and view detailed reports.
I think every marketer, especially social media managers, will fall in love with this tool.
The analytics are in-depth and give a clear picture of mention volumes, engagement, and sentiment trends.
For example, if your posts receive a lot of happy or positive comments, YouScan will generally reflect a positive sentiment. On the flip side, if the posts show negative reactions or dissatisfaction, the sentiment will be negative as well.
My favorite part is the Insights Copilot, powered by ChatGPT. It makes data analysis easy by generating quick summaries and actionable insights based on what you're looking for. For example, you can ask what customers like about your product, and it will give you a quick summary based on social media mentions.
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I also enjoyed the ability to make custom dashboards in 1,000 different ways.
Consensus is an AI market analysis tool that digs into scientific studies to give you clear, actionable insights. Instead of just giving you a list of academic papers like traditional search engines, Consensus scans these papers and summarizes the key findings.
In other words, it pinpoints relevant answers. It doesn't just point you to a resource. Consensus is set up like a chatbot so it uses advanced NLP and machine learning to understand the content and present the most relevant information in a simple, easy-to-read format.
Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing:Free plan available. Starting at $10 for an individual pro plan.
Best for: Marketers seeking reliable scientific information. It can help marketers reveal what factors influence purchasing decisions, how different demographics respond to various marketing strategies, and what trends are emerging in the market.
(Personally, I'm going to be using this for data and facts to supplement blog articles.)
What I like: The Collaboration Hub feature is great for working in real-time with your team members.
While playing around with Consensus, I typed in something about mindfulness and sleep, and within seconds, I had a concise summary of the relevant research.
It pulled together key points from multiple papers into one clear overview.
Then there's the Copilot feature, which adds even deeper insights using GPT-style summaries, complete with clickable citations for easy access to the sources.
The Consensus Meter is a great feature, too. I asked a yes/no question, and it broke down the research findings with percentages - giving me a quick snapshot of where the science stands.
The ability to save searches, export citations, and integrate with tools like Zotero makes it a must-have for serious research. Moreover, marketers can use this information to create targeted ads and content.
Lexalytics is a text analysis tool that helps businesses understand large amounts of written data. It can determine if people are feeling positive or negative, identify key names and places, and determine what main topics are being discussed.
Let's say a company is preparing to launch a new smartwatch, for example.
Lexalytics can scan social media and reviews to see how people are feeling about the current smartwatch options and market. Then, it can track real-time discussions to identify what people are talking about most in relation to them.
Is it battery life or design? The answer helps the company highlight these trends in their product launch.
By identifying keywords (e.g., industry influencers, competitors) and places (e.g., tech hubs, major cities) mentioned in the data, the company can tailor their marketing campaigns to target specific audiences or regions.
Like, if a popular tech influencer is getting a lot of attention, the company could reach out to them and offer an exclusive review or endorsement, turning that attention into brand hype.
Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing: Request a demo to get more info about pricing.
Best for: Marketing teams, product managers, customer support, data analysts, and researchers who need to analyze and understand sentiment trends in feedback and data.
What I like: The tool effectively handles nuances like negations and intensifiers, which makes results more accurate.
I decided to focus on sentiment analysis to see how the tool handles this aspect.
First, I created a chart widget in the dashboard and selected the sentiment polarity option.
For my test, I focused on the top 10 topics, which gave me a good range of data to analyze. I started by viewing the total number of documents to understand how sentiment was distributed - positive, negative, and neutral - across these topics.
Next, I adjusted the widget to show the percentages of documents rather than raw counts.
This change provided a clearer picture of what fraction of the documents were positive, negative, or neutral for each topic. It was interesting to compare these percentages and see how sentiment varied by topic.
Crayon AI is a tool that provides competitive intelligence and market research insights through AI-driven analytics.
Crayon continuously tracks competitor activities across various channels - websites, social media, and news sources. And with this inside scoop, you can see all their moves and make savvy, well-informed decisions.
Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing: Pricing depends on your needs and team size. Reach out for a demo to get your quote.
Best for:Individuals and teams who want to track multiple competitors, manage detailed battle cards, and organize insights across various topics.
What I like: Compete Hub, which acts as a newsfeed for my latest announcements and helps me stay on top of industry developments.
Crayon AI provides impressive insights with just a click.
The platform's machine learning algorithm prioritizes critical updates, such as significant changes to competitors' homepages over minor social media posts. This kind of discernment is a strategic game changer for marketers.
I particularly love the daily email summaries, which deliver a curated list of the most critical insights to my inbox, saving me from endless alert checking.
Try HubSpot AI Summarization to easily generate business reports, summarize customer interactions, and boost productivity with AI-driven insights.
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Poll The People helps you have a global conversation with your target audience. The platform offers more than just polls - it also incorporates public opinions and deeper surveys.
With Poll the People, businesses can find the collective thoughts of a large group and make informed decisions based on widespread feedback - curated and analyzed with Open AI to prevent biases and human-prone errors.
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Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans starting at $50/month.
Best for: Marketers, product developers, UX/UI designers, business owners, and researchers who need quick, targeted feedback to make informed decisions.
What I like: It's not just a text-based tool. Upload images and get feedback on specific designs or logos.
I used it to get feedback on potential titles for a book. I set up a quick poll asking for opinions on which title resonated best with readers. Within a short period, I received 100 responses that provided valuable insights into what my audience likes.
The process was incredibly straightforward.
I created the poll with two-choice options and targeted the responses to make sure they came from my intended audience.
Note: I don't recommend the free version because you pay per response; for example, one response costs $1, so 100 responses would cost $100. It's more cost-effective to opt for a monthly plan to get a reasonable sample size.
Breeze by HubSpot is an AI-powered assistant that simplifies market research. It combines the capabilities of ChatGPT to give you powerful insights and personalized responses.
You can quickly spot trends, track customer needs, and get valuable data using pre-made templates and real-time information. It integrates with your HubSpot CRM, letting you connect with your data.
Scouting sales leads or digging into company details like funding rounds and tech stacks? Breeze makes research easy and gets the most out of it.
Noteworthy features for market research:
Pricing: Breeze is free to use with every HubSpot plan (including free) and automatically connects to your HubSpot account.
Best for: Marketers, sales teams, customer service reps, business analysts, content creators, small business owners, and project managers who use HubSpot and want actionable insights and improved efficiency in their work with it.
What I like: It's seamless integration into the HubSpot tools and also its ability to pull data from outside the platform.
Pro tip: Talk to Breeze as if it were your best teammate. Provide it with demographic details about your audience and ask it to respond with motivations and struggles using your target's language.
First, I tested Breeze's primary chat feature by asking it a question about current e-commerce trends:
As you can see, it provided a thorough breakdown of seven trends (in less than 30 seconds, a summary, and included links to each source.
Then, I tried a more specific use case - asking about what influences clients when choosing between Google Drive and Dropbox for cloud storage.
Breeze "reasoned" for 35 seconds, then delivered another detailed breakdown of eight features and sources. But Breeze offers more than just a question-answer feature.
For HubSpot users, it can help with sales prospecting by sharing handy templates, drafting blog posts and social media updates, and even generating AI images. It also lets you dig into company data like funding and tech used.
Plus, you can manage your HubSpot CRM tasks - like adding contacts and creating notes - using natural language commands, making everything more intuitive and efficient.
Looking at the options we mentioned, you may be thinking: "Ok, so what's the right AI market research tool for me?" And, honestly, it may be one, some, or even none of these.
Need to understand customer sentiment? YouScan excels at social listening. Struggling with competitor tracking? Crayon automates intelligence gathering. Want to validate ideas quickly? Poll The People delivers rapid consumer feedback. Heck, if you're a HubSpot user, Breeze can help you in many of these areas.
There are hundreds of AI market research tools out there, and selecting the right one depends on your specific research goals, budget, and existing tech stack. Follow these steps to make the best choice for your needs.
First, identify your market research pain point. Most AI tools for market research, including the ones we discussed, have niche uses and specialties. Narrowing down your current challenge will help you figure out what type of tool you need (e.g., Competitor Tracking vs. Social Media Listening).
The best AI tool is one your team will actually use. Consider how each option fits your workflow - does it integrate with your current platforms? Can it scale as your research needs grow? With your challenge in mind, experiment with free trials/plans and demos to see which of the available options is the most suited to your needs
As useful as a tool might be, if it doesn't fit your budget, it may do more harm than good. Evaluate your top choices on how much potential return they will offer you.
Begin with one tool that addresses your most pressing need. Master its capabilities, measure the impact, then gradually add complementary tools. This approach ensures adoption while building your team's AI research capabilities systematically.
Yes, ChatGPT does well at most market research tasks. It can analyze customer feedback, identify patterns in survey responses, and generate insights from conversational data. It can even find qualitative trends in numerical data. (One of my favorite uses).
However, I have found it hallucinates frequently and a bit unpredictably. That said, it's important to ask ChatGPT to cite its sources so you can actually verify its insights.
Pro tip: Breeze combines ChatGPT's capabilities with HubSpot's CRM data for even more powerful research applications.
The "best" tool depends on your specific needs. For comprehensive social media analysis, YouScan leads the pack for many. Gong tends to dominate sales conversation insights while Crayon excels at competitive intelligence, and Breeze
Start by identifying your primary research goal, then choose the tool specializing in that area.
Begin with a free tool like Breeze or a free plan/trial of paid platforms. Focus on one specific research task-perhaps competitor monitoring or customer sentiment analysis. Once you see results and understand the workflow, expand to additional tools that complement your initial choice.
Instead of treating AI tools as replacements for traditional market research, think of them as amplifiers. They can help sharpen your insights and free up time to focus on strategy and creative execution.
Whether you choose one specialized tool or build a full stack, the sooner you integrate AI into your research process, the sooner you'll uncover the kind of intelligence that can truly set your marketing apart.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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