As of 13 August 2026, AI can find common complaints about your competitors.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a spreadsheet and create columns for competitor, source URL, source type, date, verbatim excerpt, complaint theme and notes.
   2. List the competitor names, UK market, product area and customer journey you want to compare, and define what counts as a relevant complaint.
   3. Paste the prompt into an AI research tool and replace the bracketed slots with that scope and competitor list.
   4. Copy each cited example into the spreadsheet, keeping the source URL and exact excerpt rather than only the AI summary.
   5. Open the cited pages and remove entries that are inaccessible, duplicated, clearly promotional or not genuine customer evidence.
   6. Ask the AI to regroup the cleaned spreadsheet into themes and compare the result with your product priorities and any existing customer research before using it in a strategy document.

   Prompt

   Research common customer complaints about these competitors: [COMPETITOR NAMES]. Focus on [PRODUCT, SERVICE OR CUSTOMER JOURNEY]. Use publicly accessible sources relevant to the UK where available, such as review pages, discussion forums, app-store reviews and public social posts. Do not infer complaints from marketing copy, one isolated comment or an unverified claim. For every complaint example, provide the source URL, source type, publication date if shown, a short verbatim excerpt and the competitor it concerns. Remove duplicates and group the evidence into complaint themes. For each theme, report: the theme name, what customers appear to be complaining about, the number of distinct examples found, the named competitors, the source links, and a confidence label based only on the quality and spread of the evidence. Separate direct customer comments from your interpretation. Do not claim that a complaint is common across all customers or that a competitor has breached a law. Flag inaccessible, deleted, sponsored or obviously duplicated sources. Finish with a table of themes and a short section called 'What this research cannot establish'.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.