Your next product idea might be sitting in your competitors’ one-star reviews. You just don’t have time to read 500 of them.
That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. Not to invent ideas out of thin air, but to chew through a pile of customer complaints and tell you what people are actually frustrated about.
The Competitor Review Trick
Here’s the workflow. It’s simpler than it sounds:
- Gather reviews of competing products from Amazon, Yelp, Google, or G2 (a review site for business software). Most platforms don’t offer an export, so you’ll copy and paste in batches. Skip scraping tools. Most review sites’ terms of service restrict bulk copying, so stick to a reasonable number of reviews for your own analysis.
- Paste them into ChatGPT or Claude with a prompt like: “Group these reviews by complaint type, rank the groups by how often they come up, and list any needs customers say no product meets.”
- Read the output. You’ll get a ranked list of what customers wish existed, in their own words.
Doing this by hand, reading hundreds of reviews and tagging themes in a spreadsheet, takes days. With AI, the first pass takes minutes, plus your time checking it.
Cost: Both tools have free tiers with usage limits. A big batch of reviews may push you past them, and ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro are each $20 a month.
Watch Out for Fake Reviews
Fake reviews will skew your results. You may have seen Fakespot recommended for spotting them. Mozilla shut Fakespot down on July 1, 2025, so that option is gone.
Use your own judgment instead. Be wary of bursts of five-star reviews posted within a few days, vague praise that never mentions the product, and reviewers with no history. Leave those out of your batch.
Check That People Are Searching for It
Spotting a gap isn’t enough. You need to know if anyone’s looking for the fix.
Google Trends (free) shows whether interest in a phrase is growing or shrinking. Google Keyword Planner is also free with a Google Ads account. Its monthly search estimates are rough, but they’re enough to tell “nobody searches this” from “thousands do.”
A small skincare brand, for example, might find that complaints about a competitor’s sunscreen irritating sensitive skin line up with steady searches for fragrance-free options. That’s a signal worth testing.
Going Deeper (Optional)
- Exploding Topics tracks fast-growing trends before they go mainstream. The Entrepreneur plan is $39 a month, with a 7-day free trial.
- SparkToro shows what a given audience reads, watches, and follows. There’s a free plan with 3 previews a month, and the Personal plan is $38 a month billed yearly.
When This Isn’t Worth It
If your competitors have only a few dozen reviews between them, just read them. AI won’t find patterns in 30 reviews that you can’t spot over coffee.
And AI only knows what you paste in. If it tells you something about a competitor that isn’t in the reviews, it guessed. Check three or four of its claims against the original reviews before you act on any of them.
Your Takeaway
Start free. Pick your top competitor, grab 100 or so of their reviews, and run them through ChatGPT or Claude with the prompt above. Then check the top complaint in Google Trends. You’ll have a short list of real customer frustrations, and each one is a possible opportunity.
Prices checked on vendor websites on October 8, 2026.