I Pressure-Tested Six Local Business Verticals With AI Market Research in One Afternoon

I’m a Principal Engineer, and I was about to build an AI-powered service business for local businesses in the Denver metro. Before writing a line of code, I wanted to know something basic: does anyone actually want this? So instead of guessing, I connected Claude Code to a live SEO data source and spent an afternoon interrogating the market. Here’s what that looked like, and why “just ask an AI” is the wrong way to describe what actually happened. The Setup I connected the Semrush MCP server to Claude Code — one command, one authentication step — and started asking questions the way you’d interrogate a colleague who happened to have a Bloomberg terminal for search data: What’s the search volume for “med spa Denver”? Who’s already ranking? Are they running ads? What do the actual business owners search for when they need help? No dashboards. No exporting CSVs into a spreadsheet and pivot-tabling my way to an insight three days later. Just a conversation that got sharper with every…