Key Takeaways
With your research VA, you can get regular updates on statutory requirements, tax regulations, minimum wage laws, insurance requirements and government schemes.
Without the oversight of a human with research experience, AI tools cannot be trusted to provide reliable answers.
Losing hours trying to find the property tax rate in Wyoming?
Maybe you skipped lunch to look for the best template for your upcoming presentation.
What about that SaaS blog you wanted to start but never got time to research?
As a business owner, you have clients to meet, projects to approve, processes to improve, investments to make and losses to cover. In such chaos, there’s no time to chase rabbit holes.
By hiring a virtual assistant to handle your research tasks, you can work on core tasks and get crisp, clear information to make better decisions.
What Can a Virtual Assistant for Online Research Do?
By delegating your research tasks to a virtual assistant, you save yourself from time-consuming tasks and focus on growing your business.
Their tasks range from finding keywords, software, products, vendors and restaurants to conducting competitor research by finding information on websites, customer forums, news and other sources.
With their help, you can back up your ideas with information and make them a reality!
Here are some more research tasks you can delegate to your new virtual research assistant.
Admin Research
Want to find out whether you need a visa to go to Hong Kong? Need to order a birthday present for your friend? Want to book a conference room in central Tokyo?
Such tasks require a deep attention to detail. A misread date or hallucinated info about a flight ticket can have major consequences for you and your team’s schedule.
Your web research virtual assistant can look up this information, read online reviews, double-check everything on official websites and prepare an accurate summary to share with you.
They can also help you find tourist spots, local food joints, party venues, dentists and more. If you’re traveling, they can search for the cheapest flights, hotels and car rentals.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Slack, they can find other popular chat tools that fit your budget, summarize their features and payment plans and recommend a shortlist for you to choose from.
What about the best deals and offers on your favorite brands? Just ask the virtual assistant to subscribe to their newsletter and they’ll keep you posted in case a new sale goes live.
All this saves tons of time you can then use to actually work on your business. This is important because 45% of business owners admit to spending too much time on admin that could be delegated!
Keyword Research
If you’re a business, chances are that you want higher SEO and AEO rankings just as much as everybody else. To get that, you need to find out what people are searching for on the internet.
A virtual research assistant’s skills can help you a lot here.
They can use SEO tools like Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic to shortlist keywords. The VA can also look for keywords used by competitors in their blogs and article titles.
What’s more? You can get them to analyze the Google Search results and find search terms in the “related searches” or “people also search for” sections.
These keywords can then be added to your website copy, blog articles, product pages and ad campaigns.
They can also check which articles are getting featured in AI Overviews and compile tips for better GEO/AEO optimization.
With this knowledge, your business can show up in the right places with the right answers and earn credibility in the market.
Read more: Craft High-Quality Content With a Content Writing Virtual Assistant
Lead Research
Want to tap a new target group? Need more contact lists?
No matter what industry you work in, a virtual research assistant can help you find leads online. You can ask them to find the contact details of:
- Property owners on Zillow.
- Vacation rentals on Tripadvisor.
- Vet clinics on Yelp.
- Influencers on Instagram or YouTube.
- Key business leaders or executives on LinkedIn.
They can organize this information in well-formatted spreadsheets so that they can be easily imported into your CRM.
You can also ask the VA to create free guides or resources useful for your audience. These lead magnets are direct lead-generation tools. Using these, you can collect contact information and provide value to prospective leads.
Read more: Why Every Realtor Needs a Real Estate Virtual Assistant for Lead Generation
Market Research
An entrepreneur’s mind is a sea of great ideas. But to bridge the gap between an idea and its execution, you need a crazy amount of information.
You need to scrutinize every aspect of this idea before you can proceed.
- Is there a demand for such a product/service?
- Who can be the target audience for this product?
- What are the specific pain points of this audience?
- Will I be able to find investors for this product?
- What costs will I incur?
- What will my profit margins look like?
- Is this idea even scalable?
- Is anybody else already doing this? How established are they?
This is just preliminary market research. You need to know so much more before you make the jump.
With a virtual assistant for research, you can focus on the bigger picture while they find these nitty-gritty details.
Moreover, they can look up competitors and check their reviews on online forums like Reddit, Quora, Glassdoor, Amazon and more.
Your market research virtual assistant can also monitor trends relevant to your niche—making it very easy to stay updated on emerging industry trends.
Read more: Executive Assistant vs Virtual Assistant: Who Is the Right Fit for Your Business?
Compliance Research
As a business owner, you must be aware of legal regulations at all times. With your research sidekick close by, you can get regular updates on statutory requirements, tax regulations, minimum wage laws, insurance requirements and government schemes.
Your research virtual assistant can find reliable government sources, sift through long, detailed documents and pick up relevant points for you. You can ask them to find information on literally anything, like:
- What are the Cookie Consent compliance requirements in Australia?
- Are we eligible for this government grant for small businesses?
- What is the average seed round for Canadian startups?
- Will the recent events in Turkey affect my travel plans?
Not only that, but they can also summarize and organize their research for you and present it professionally in spreadsheets, reports, presentations, slide decks, etc.
This way, you only have to read exactly what you were looking for and not try to find a needle in a haystack every other day.
Read more: Why Outsource Foreclosure Data Entry for Better Accuracy
Do I Even Need a Virtual Assistant Researcher When I Can Just Use AI in 2026?
Quality data has six main components. These are
1. Accuracy
2. Completeness
3. Timeliness and currency
4. Consistency
5. Uniqueness
6. Data granularity and relevance
While these are mainly focused on data, they can also be applied to business-related research. And hundreds of stories across the internet show that GenAI has consistently failed to deliver on these components.
Without the oversight of a human with research experience, AI tools cannot be trusted to provide reliable answers.
Here are some real risks businesses face while using AI for research.
Hallucinations
A Canadian passenger booked a flight from an airline’s official website and asked for specific discounts from their chatbot. The chatbot told him he could apply for a reimbursement after the flight, when no such policy existed.
The company later faced a lawsuit and was held liable to pay the passenger in damages, with the court ruling saying that the company is responsible for what is said on its website.
In another instance, a grad student shared on Reddit:
… Today I asked gpt to find some research that backed a claim I was making in a grad research paper. It came up with five sources. The one I liked the most, I copied the name and article title down and looked it up on google scholar to get the actual article. No such author. I looked it up on regular old Google. No such author or article. But my first result from Google was “how to manage AI hallucinations”. Thought that was rather ironic.
—A grad student on Reddit
An AI hallucination refers to instances where a model makes confident claims that seem real but are factually wrong, inaccurate, or entirely fabricated.
Almost every AI tool in the market today is known to make up statistics, policies, court cases and other crucial information.
As such, you can never trust any claim an AI tool makes.
If you do, then such errors can show up in information you share with clients or claims you make publicly—seriously damaging your company’s reputation.
Lack of Nuance
Large language models give responses by synthesizing the material they have been trained on. They don’t actively retrieve information from sources.
There is also no scope for original comprehension of the information/data that it gathers. Its strategic recommendations and analysis lack nuance and often miss small details that sometimes reveal a completely different meaning of the information.
Hence, AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, no matter how dated, insufficient or inaccurate the training data may be.
Benefits of Your Virtual Research Assistant’s Services
Whether you need research assistance for a short project or need someone who can source reliable information long-term, virtual assistants provide scalable support.
Here are some more benefits of hiring a virtual assistant for your research tasks.
Make Informed Decisions
Data quality directly affects the quality of the insights based on it.
And business owners deserve such reliable data.
Data that doesn’t make them wonder whether it’s correct. Data that reflects what is happening today—not what happened six months ago, not what someone guessed, not what someone accidentally overwrote, not what someone made up for commercial gains.
With a research virtual assistant, you get accurate, precise data verified with the original source.
As such, you’re able to see patterns and trends clearly, make better future predictions and align your strategy to meet your goals.
Get Ahead of Competitors
With research VAs, you get better customer and market data and stay on top of industry trends. This data is highly useful for designing marketing campaigns, prototyping products and improving services.
You also get insights into customers’ pain points, which you can use to enhance client experience at your company, both pre- and post-purchase.
Now more than ever, this is important as 89% of companies offering high-quality customer experiences report better revenue growth!
Delegate High-Effort, Hive-Value Tasks
An employee spends roughly 9 hours every week searching and gathering necessary information for their work.
Even if you have a lean team of five people, that’s still around 45 working hours wasted every week!
An offshore virtual assistant for research who is also more affordable than onshore VAs is the natural solution here.
You and your core team can delegate all such tasks and get the required information in your desired formats. This ensures uninterrupted productivity for your team.
The time saved can be reinvested into core tasks and projects that need your full attention!
Enhance Work-Life Balance
Unfortunately, many leaders still think the main cause of burnout is overworking.
In reality, it’s not only about the volume of work but also about how work is designed.
People like challenging tasks that push them to solve problems and make progress.
But repetitive or redundant tasks that take time, sometimes even without any results, affect their morale. If this continues for longer periods, work becomes monotonous and leads to fatigue and eventually burnout.
While research is an important task, it can be really tedious at times. Onboarding a research virtual assistant is a great way to support your employees and keep them motivated and engaged in meaningful work!
Hiring a Virtual Research Assistant
With the volume of information available on the internet, it’s easy to lose hours of your day to research. That’s why more than 70% of executives hire virtual assistants for such tasks.
And yes, there is a right way to hire a VA. By hiring a VA from an overseas outsourcing agency like Zenius, you can eliminate hassles and set yourself up for long-term success.
Define Expectations
Before you reach out to an agency, try to answer the following questions.
What will be the scope of your research tasks? What kind of support do you need?
Do you need someone to conduct on-site surveys and interviews for you? Or do you need them to handle online research activities to support your business?
If it’s the former, a virtual assistant sitting miles away might not be able to help you much. But if it’s the latter, then list out a few tasks that come to your mind.
Do you need them to find the contact details of leads for your business? Or do you need information on your competitors to make business decisions? Does your SEO head require some keyword research support?
Internet research has a vast scope, so you must outline your specific requirements. This will prevent future confusion and smooth your hiring process.
At this stage, you might even find out that you need a virtual assistant to handle all social media tasks. Remember to narrow down your search among the various types of VAs.
Onboard Properly
Once the agency has matched your requirements, it’s time to onboard your new virtual assistant.
Send over a welcome email to show appreciation and set a positive tone for your working relationship.
If your new virtual assistant will be working with your in-house employees, break the ice by hopping on a warm-up call to introduce them.
Before work starts, you must prepare training materials, process documentation and SOPs for the VA. If you provide comprehensive training at the onboarding stage, you can reduce back-and-forth on future tasks and save a lot of time.
If you need them to use social media for research, share access to such accounts as well.
Remember to always encourage questions and doubts your virtual assistant might have.
Start Delegating
Once you’ve onboarded your new virtual research assistant properly, you can now delegate your first task!
While assigning tasks, remember to keep the deadlines clear but also realistic. Give them some room to settle into their role. Once they seem confident, you can start building up the frequency and make deadlines shorter, as per your needs.
If you have some repetitive research tasks, establish some guidelines for such tasks in advance. Templates are a great place to start with.
If you have pre-existing templates for compiling information, share these with your virtual assistant.
The success of your research virtual assistant depends both on their skills and your management style. So avoid micromanaging them.
Instead, give them some space to make decisions and become confident.
Read more: A Guide to Building High-Performance Virtual Teams
FAQs
What does a research assistant actually do?
A research virtual assistant gathers, verifies and organizes information to support business decisions. They can help with market research, competitor analysis, keyword research, lead research, trend tracking and compliance-related research.
Can research VAs do academic research also?
Yes, virtual assistants for research can support academic research by reviewing scholarly articles, journals and credible publications. They help collect and summarize findings relevant to your goals. But they cannot provide in-depth, specialized academic support as they are mainly generalists.
What skills should my research virtual assistant possess?
Look for strong online research skills, attention to detail, source verification and the ability to summarize findings clearly. It also helps if the virtual assistant is good with spreadsheets and organizing information into reports or presentations. Experience in competitor analysis, keyword research and other such research tasks is also useful, depending on your business requirements.
Final Thoughts
Whether you need them to find a new vendor, compile content for the next blog post, update you with the latest industry news, or look up information on competitors—your research virtual assistant has got your back.
By hiring a VA from Zenius, you will save hours of time and energy. With our resourceful VAs, you can make data-backed decisions like a pro!
Hire Zenius virtual research assistants to support your team!
