Automating Market Research: A Practical Guide to Using the research.do API

Market research is the bedrock of strategic business decisions. It informs product development, competitive positioning, and go-to-market strategy. But let's be honest: the traditional process is grueling. It involves countless hours spent sifting through search results, analyst reports, news articles, and customer reviews. It's manual, slow, and prone to human error.

What if you could reclaim those hours? What if you could ask your most challenging market questions and get a comprehensive, synthesized, and fully-cited report back in minutes, not weeks?

This is no longer a hypothetical. With AI-powered information retrieval, you can programmatically embed a world-class research agent directly into your workflows. Welcome to research.do—AI-powered research, on demand. This guide will show you how to leverage our simple API to automate your market research and gain a powerful competitive edge.

Why Automate Market Research in the First Place?

Before we dive into the "how," let's solidify the "why." Moving from manual to automated research isn't just an incremental improvement; it's a fundamental shift in how you operate.

• Unprecedented Speed: Get answers to complex questions in the time it takes to run a script. Free your team from the drudgery of data collection so they can focus on high-level strategy and execution.
• Comprehensive Scope: An AI agent can scan and synthesize information from thousands of sources simultaneously—a scale impossible for a human team. Uncover hidden trends and fringe competitors you might have otherwise missed.
• Consistency and Reliability: Automated workflows are repeatable and objective. Every query is executed with the same rigor, ensuring consistent data quality. Plus, with research.do, every insight is tied back to its original source for complete transparency.
• Real-Time Agility: Markets change fast. With a research API, you can re-run your analysis on a schedule or on-demand, ensuring your insights are always current.

Your Research Agent, Ready for Duty

research.do is a simple but powerful service designed to do one thing exceptionally well: turn complex questions into actionable insights.

At its core, research.do provides an AI agent you can command via an API. You provide a question, specify the sources you want to consult, and define the output format you need. The agent then performs the automated analysis and data synthesis, delivering a structured response ready for use in your applications or internal reports.

A Practical Guide: Automating Competitive Analysis

Let's walk through a common market research task: analyzing your competitors.

The Goal: We want to generate a report on the key features, pricing strategies, and recent customer sentiment for our main competitors in the enterprise software space.

Step 1: Get Your API Key

First, you'll need to install the SDK and initialize the client with your unique API key from the research.do dashboard.

npm install @do-sdk/client

Step 2: Craft Your Query

Now, let's write the code to ask our question. We'll use natural language to define our query, specify the sources we trust, and request a comprehensive report.

import { createDo } from '@do-sdk/client';

// Initialize the research.do client with your API key
const research = createDo('research.do');

/**
 * This function performs a competitive analysis using the research.do API.
 */
async function runCompetitiveAnalysis() {
  console.log("Querying research.do for competitive insights...");

  const report = await research.query({
    question: "What are the key features, pricing models, and recent customer sentiment for enterprise software competitors like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle NetSuite?",
    sources: ["web", "news-articles", "google-scholar"],
    depth: "comprehensive",
    format: "summary_report"
  });

  console.log("--- Competitive Analysis Report ---");
  console.log(report.summary);
  console.log("\n--- Sources Cited ---");
  // The full report object includes detailed citations
  // console.log(report.citations);
}

runCompetitiveAnalysis();

Step 3: Understand the Power of the Query

Let's break down what makes this simple API call so powerful:

• question: This is where the magic happens. You can ask specific, complex questions in natural language. The more detailed your question, the more targeted your results will be.
• sources: You have complete control over where the agent looks for information. You can specify broad categories like "web" and "news-articles", or target academic databases like "arxiv" and "google-scholar". You can even connect your own private data sources.
• depth: Choose between a "concise" overview for a quick look or a "comprehensive" deep dive for detailed analysis.
• format: Tailor the output to your needs. While we asked for a "summary_report", you could also request "bullet_points" for a presentation, or "raw_data" for ingestion into another analytical tool.

Step 4: Use the Actionable Insights

The report object returned by the API is more than just a block of text. It's a structured piece of information. The summary provides a synthesized narrative, but the full object contains a wealth of data, including a list of all sources consulted with direct links. This ensures every claim is verifiable, building trust and allowing for deeper exploration if needed.

Beyond Competitors: More Automated Research Use Cases

The possibilities for automated information retrieval are vast. You can use research.do to:

• Scout for New Technology: "What are the latest advancements in quantum computing and their potential impact on cryptography?"
• Analyze Market Trends: "Summarize emerging consumer trends in the sustainable packaging industry based on reports from the last 12 months."
• Accelerate Academic Reviews: "Provide a literature review on the use of generative AI in drug discovery, citing key papers from arXiv and PubMed."

Your Questions, Answered

Here are answers to some common questions about using research.do.

Q: What kind of sources can research.do access?
A: research.do can access a vast array of sources, including public web pages, academic databases like arXiv and Google Scholar, news articles, and even your private, connected data sources. You can specify which sources to use in your query.

Q: How does research.do ensure the information is accurate and reliable?
A: Our agent prioritizes authoritative sources and cross-references information to ensure accuracy. Each result includes citations and links back to the original sources, allowing for complete transparency and verification.

Q: Can I customize the output format?
A: Yes. You can request various output formats, such as a concise summary, a list of bullet points, a detailed report, or raw data with citations, tailored to your specific needs.

Q: Is research.do suitable for academic or business research?
A: Absolutely. research.do is designed for both. Academics can accelerate literature reviews, while businesses can perform market research, competitive analysis, and technology scouting with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

Start Automating Today

Stop wasting time on manual data collection and start building a real information advantage. By integrating a powerful research API into your workflow, you empower your team to focus on what truly matters: making brilliant, data-driven decisions.

Ready to revolutionize your research process? Explore the research.do documentation and get your API key today!