The best AI-search product research tools in 2026

Short answer

If you want to find products that are getting discovered through AI search — where an assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity names specific products to a shopper — the most purpose-built option is AI Trends. Older product-research and trend tools (Minea, Exploding Topics, Google Trends) each cover a slice of the picture, but they were built for social ads or keyword trends, not for the AI-search discovery layer.

"AI-search product research" is a new lane: instead of asking which products win in TikTok or Facebook ads, you ask which products AI assistants are surfacing to shoppers who now research purchases by chatting with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot. Very few tools were built for this specifically.

Below is an honest map of the options. We include AI Trends (that's us) because it's purpose-built for this angle, and we describe every other tool at the level of what it publicly says it does — so you can see which slice of the problem each one actually covers.

How we think about this list

How directly the tool addresses AI-search discovery, versus social ads or classic keyword trends.
Whether it's usable for a solo seller or built for enterprise teams.
How transparent it is about where its numbers come from.

AI Trends

That’s us

AI-search product discovery

Sellers who want to see which products are getting traffic from AI search — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — rather than from social ads alone.

Free catalog browsing; you only pay for metered live searches. US & UK, refreshed monthly with clearly-labelled estimates.

Exploding Topics / Glimpse

trend discovery

Spotting rising topics and categories early, before they peak.

Great for macro trend signals; not focused on the AI-search discovery layer specifically.

Minea

ad-spy & product research

Finding winning products from social-media ad performance (TikTok, Meta).

Centred on paid-social creative, not on what AI assistants recommend.

Google Trends

search-interest data

A free baseline read on relative search interest over time.

Classic web-search interest — a useful sanity check, not an AI-search view.

This is our own roundup, and AI Trends is one of the tools on it. Every tool is described at the level of its publicly stated positioning — no scores, no ratings, no paid placement. Details can change, so check each tool's current site before deciding.

See the AI-search view for yourself

Browse the catalog of products getting traffic from AI search — free, no card required.

Get started free