How to Use AI to Discover Untapped Markets for Your Business

One of the biggest challenges for any business is identifying areas of opportunity before the competition does. With the help of AI, businesses can scan vast amounts of data, recognize hidden patterns, and uncover market gaps that traditional research methods often miss. According to studies AI in marketing market size is expected to reach a value of $217.33 billion by 2034. This shows how AI isn't just hype, it's driving real business outcomes.

1. Understand Current Market Saturation

Before you explore new markets, you need to know how saturated your current market is. This means analysing how many players exist, how similar their offerings are, and how competitive the space has become. Without this clarity, your expansion might be misdirected or waste resources.

Tools That Can Help:

1. Crayon 

For businesses looking to track their competitive landscape in real-time, an AI-powered tool like Crayon offers powerful market intelligence. It continuously collects digital signals from competitors, helping you understand strategic shifts before they go mainstream. From pricing updates to campaign messaging changes, this platform keeps you ahead.

Key Features:

• Real-time tracking: Automatically monitors competitor moves like product launches and messaging updates.
• Competitive insights dashboard: Provides a visual overview of your position compared to key players.
• Market and messaging analysis: Highlights trends in competitor language and offers to identify saturation.

Crayon helps spot when a market is becoming too crowded or when a new angle emerges that others haven’t noticed yet.

2. SimilarWeb 

Understanding where your competitors are getting traffic from can reveal untapped online opportunities. SimilarWeb provides detailed data on traffic sources, engagement metrics, and audience behaviors across websites. It’s a digital intelligence tool for marketers, strategists, and product teams alike.

Key Features:

• Traffic source breakdown: It shows where competitor traffic is coming from, including direct, search, and referral channels.
• Audience geography mapping: The tool identifies which countries and regions are generating interest in similar businesses.
• Engagement metrics tracking: It provides data like bounce rate, visit duration, and page views per visit for any site.
• Keyword gap analysis: This reveals which keywords bring traffic to competitors but not to your site.

3. ChatGPT Search Feature

When you need fast insights backed by the latest data, ChatGPT’s Search feature is a valuable addition to your toolkit. It pulls live data from the web and compiles answers into actionable summaries. This is especially useful for market-specific queries where timing matters.

Key Features

• Deep Research summaries: It compiles accurate, detailed insights from a wide range of sources to answer complex queries.
• Fresh web data access: The Search feature retrieves the latest stats, trends, and market updates directly from the internet.
• Audience segmentation prompts: You can request breakdowns of customer segments by interest, region, or behavior.
• Trend interpretation assistance: It helps turn vague trend signals into actionable market opportunities.

Example Prompt:

"Analyze the current saturation level in the eco-friendly skincare market in North America. List the top 10 competitors, their key differentiators, pricing strategies, and recent messaging shifts. Include traffic trends, audience demographics, and keyword gaps using SimilarWeb data. Summarize opportunities based on Crayon's real-time insights.”

2. Discover Underserved Demographics

Even in saturated markets, there are often customer groups that aren’t being served well—or at all. These could be based on income, region, language, age, or profession. Understanding who is left out can help you tailor new offers and carve a niche that competitors overlook.

Tools to Use:

1. Audiense

If you're trying to discover who your ideal customers are and where they engage online, Audiense is a powerful tool. It uses AI to identify audience segments and digital communities based on behavior, interests, and demographics. The platform is useful for both campaign targeting and strategic planning.

Key Features:

• Audience segmentation engine: It creates detailed audience profiles based on interests, behaviors, and demographics.
• Influencer and interest mapping: The tool identifies key influencers and interest clusters in your niche.
• Social conversation analysis: It monitors social chatter to uncover trending topics and unmet needs.
• Campaign planning support: Audiense offers insights for better messaging, timing, and targeting.

2. Google Trends 

For identifying shifts in search behavior, Google Trends is a simple but effective tool. While it’s not driven by AI itself, it integrates well with AI tools to support market research and content planning. It reveals when, where, and how interest in a topic changes.

Key Features:

• Keyword trend analysis: It shows how search interest in specific terms changes over time.
• Regional interest data: You can see which locations have growing or declining interest in your topic.
• Search volume comparison: It lets you compare the popularity of multiple terms side-by-side.
• Seasonal pattern detection: The tool highlights when demand typically rises or falls each year.

3. ChatGPT Deep Research

You can analyse complex documents and identify niche insights with ChatGPT’s Deep Research mode that adds serious value. It can review long reports, customer feedback, and online discussions, then distill them into clear business insights. This helps cut through noise and save hours of manual reading.

Example prompt:

"Identify underserved customer demographics in the U.S. personal finance app market. Use Audiense to segment audiences by age, income, and interests. Then, analyze regional trends using Google Trends. Highlight at least 3 specific niches or personas (e.g., Spanish-speaking Gen Z gig workers) that show unmet needs or lack of tailored solutions.”

3. Spot Emerging Product Categories

Finding the next big thing before it goes mainstream gives you a massive edge. Whether it's a new wellness trend, tech innovation, or lifestyle shift, early insight lets you build before the market catches up.

Tools To Use:

1. Trend Hunter AI 

Spotting early signs of change in the market can be difficult without the right tools. Trend Hunter AI scans massive amounts of online content to surface innovations and shifts in consumer behavior. It’s used by product teams, marketers, and analysts to anticipate future trends.

Key Features:

• Global trend scanning: The tool scans media, product launches, and consumer behavior globally for pattern detection.
• Innovation scoring system: It rates trends based on potential impact and longevity.
• Industry-specific reports: Trend Hunter provides downloadable insights tailored to different industries.
• Custom dashboards: Users can track specific themes, industries, or innovation styles.

2. Exploding Topics 

Catching a trend before it takes off gives you a strategic advantage. Exploding Topics uses AI to detect fast-growing search terms across industries. It's especially helpful for identifying product ideas and content opportunities that are still under the radar.

Key Features:

• Trend acceleration detection: It highlights topics growing in search volume before they go mainstream.
• Category-based exploration: You can browse emerging trends across industries like SaaS, health, and marketing.
• Monthly growth reports: These reports include curated trend updates with potential use cases.
• Search and filter system: It allows users to find trends by keyword, category, or speed of growth.

3. ChatGPT  and Search Tool

Example Prompt:

"Identify five emerging product categories in the pet wellness space in South America. Prioritize those with high innovation scores and rapid keyword growth. Provide potential product concepts, why they're gaining traction, and examples of early adopters or startups in the space.”

4. Analyze International Growth Potential

Markets that seem mature in one country may be emerging in another. AI tools help businesses understand where products or services could take off globally. This minimizes guesswork and reduces risk.

Tools You Can Use:

1. Glimpse 

When you need to spot market opportunities based on geography, Glimpse offers data-driven clarity. It tracks early-stage trends by country, giving insight into what consumers are starting to care about in different parts of the world.

Key Features:

• Emerging topic alerts: It surfaces fast-growing keywords and interest spikes by location.
• Market-specific filtering: You can narrow down by region, topic, or business vertical.
• Signal strength scoring: Each trend is scored to indicate growth potential and sustainability.
• Chrome extension: You can use Glimpse directly in Google Trends for added insights.

2. SimilarWeb 

It analyzes web traffic, user behavior, and digital trends across millions of websites and apps globally. It’s used by marketers, business strategists, product teams, and analysts to uncover online opportunities, benchmark competitors, and optimize go-to-market strategies.

You can use SimilarWeb’s geographic insights to identify untapped countries showing increasing interest in your category.

3. ChatGPT Deep Research and Translation Support

Prompt:

"Evaluate international growth potential for subscription-based learning apps. Identify three emerging countries with rising interest in this category using Glimpse and SimilarWeb’s geo insights. Include local keyword trends, consumer behavior, and pain points. Translate Reddit and Twitter discussions in regional languages for extra depth.”

5. Predict Customer Behavior and Needs

Anticipating what your customers will need in the future lets you serve them better than the competition. AI looks at sentiment, review patterns, and online behavior to spot these needs early.

Tools That Help:

1. Qualtrics XM Discover 

Qualtrics uses natural language processing to analyze open-text feedback across multiple channels. It’s ideal for customer experience and product development teams.

Key Features:

• Text analytics engine: It breaks down large amounts of feedback to reveal common themes and concerns.
• Real-time sentiment scoring: The tool assigns positive, neutral, or negative sentiment to each response.
• Voice of customer dashboard: Provides a central place to view feedback trends and filter by product or segment.
• Survey integration: AI features are built into Qualtrics surveys to analyze responses immediately.

2. ChatGPT Sentiment Analysis

Prompt:

"Analyze 2,000 customer reviews for productivity tools. Use Qualtrics to identify recurring frustrations, feature requests, and emotional sentiment. Then summarize the top 5 emerging needs or expectations. Prioritize these by frequency and emotional intensity (e.g., frustration vs mild annoyance).”

6. Create a Market Gap Report

Now it’s time to pull together all your findings. A market gap report helps prioritize which opportunities are worth investing in. It also helps build a pitch for internal teams or investors.

Tools That Help:

1. Crayon

Crayon offers built-in tools for compiling competitive intelligence into digestible reports. These reports help you benchmark your brand against others and identify under-served areas in your space. You can compare messaging, product features, pricing structures, and marketing tactics side by side.

Key Features:

• Custom market reports: Automatically generate reports comparing your position with competitors across messaging, pricing, and product dimensions.
• Gap visualization: Highlight where your competitors are underperforming or where they’re not active at all.
• Opportunity spotting: Uncover strategic white spaces based on what’s missing in your market.
• Presentation-ready summaries: Export insights into slides or reports to share with leadership or investors.

2. ChatGPT Custom Workflow

Example prompt:

"Create a market gap report for Gen Z-targeted financial planning tools in North America. Include a competitive feature matrix, pricing analysis, and messaging tone comparison. Identify at least three white space opportunities based on underserved financial behaviors like micro-investing or budgeting for freelancers.”

7. Validate with Low-Risk Testing

Not all market gaps are worth pursuing. AI helps validate ideas quickly and cheaply before you invest heavily in them.

Tools to Use:

1. Unbounce AI 

Testing new messaging or product ideas doesn’t need to take months. Unbounce uses AI to build landing pages that adapt to visitor behavior. You can test market demand and fine-tune messaging before making larger investments.

Key Features:

• Smart copywriting: Its AI generates headlines, CTAs, and value propositions based on your input.
• A/B test automation: It tests variations of landing pages to optimize conversions in real time.
• Pre-launch concept testing: You can validate product or service ideas before investing in development.
• Conversion intent tracking: The tool uses behavior data to personalize landing pages automatically.

Example Prompt:

"Create two Unbounce landing pages to test demand for a new micro-investment app tailored to freelance creatives aged 22–30. Use AI to generate two different messaging angles: (1) ‘Financial Freedom through Micro-Investing’ vs (2) ‘Effortless Saving for Your Creative Goals’. Track conversion rates, behavior flow, and keyword intent data for validation.”

Final Thoughts

AI tools reduce the time, cost, and guesswork of finding untapped markets. From identifying saturation to validating new ideas, each step becomes more data-driven and effective. Next Step? Pick one tool and apply it to your current business question. Then expand step by step.