Deep Research: ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude - 1 is the best by far

I put ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude through the same research test—only one felt like actual research

Chris Dunlop

Oct 12, 2025

If you go to ChatGPT there is a deep research mode.

Deep research will go off and read a bunch of sources.

It then compiles a report for you.

But I find with all these tools, that’s great and all, but are they the same?

I mean we also have Claude and Gemini and I wanted to put them all to the test to see which one was the best.

I was actually extremely surprised by how much one was better than the others. It wasn’t even a close comparison.

The experiment

I asked all 3 tools the following question:

How would you grow a Medium account from 1 to 5,000 followers?
What would you write about and what would your content plan be?

I choose this experiment for a reason

I’ve grown my Medium to 5,000 followers and 750,000 views in the last 14 months.
It’s a hard thing to answer as there is a lot of ‘thin’ advice that doesn’t really work.

After that I then got it to answer 3 different questions which I’ll talk about in a minute.

ChatGPT Review - 2/10

ChatGPT gave the worst answer by far. It referenced 18 sources and felt like reading a generic AI article.

The key things it focused on were very technical, your title, SEO words but it completely missed the point of how you have to think about writing.

It also offered advice that Medium specifically says not to do. 5 Must-Know Programming Tools for AI Engineers - is an example and Medium does not like listicles.

After I read the research, I left feeling completely lost and I can’t imagine that actually providing any help to anyone.

Gemini Review - 4/10

Gemini was better than ChatGPT, it searched far more sources and the report was more readable.

It also has tables in the report that are quite helpful

Where it falls over though is it presupposes you will just naturally progress up the curve. It’s like month 1 get to 100 followers. Month 3 get to 500 followers.

It doesn’t really explain how to get a single follower, or what you do if things don’t go perfectly to plan.

It also didn’t answer my second question at all, which was what to actually write about and what the content plan would be.

By the way these AI tools need to sort so many of their features out

On Gemini after the deep research is done it says do you want to create a quiz or flashcards. I was excited about that option

Except the quiz it gave me was a random quiz about the heart? What the heck?

It was at this point I was actually about to give up on this whole article and basically tell you not to bother with any of them.

But luckily Claude came through and saved the day.

Claude Review 9/10

Claude took twice as long as ChatGPT and Gemini and also looked at 351 sources. It took 15 minutes in total to create the report.

The thing I was impressed about was how many things reflected my exact experience

Reaching 5,000 followers on Medium in the AI/tech space requires 18-24 months of strategic effort - it took me 14 months
Publishing approximately 150 high-quality articles - I’ve published 154 articles
It recommended technical tutorials with step by step guides - this is what I did

Tactically, it recommended splitting the writing up like this:

60% technical tutorials
20% career reflections
10% tool comparisons
10% thought leadership

What surprised me the most about the Claude Deep Research report is that I actually learnt several new things about Medium that I never knew before.

It revealed insights from Medium’s head of data science
It also said to follow the ex product manager from Google
It gave me a breakdown of the biggest search trends and gave several ideas that I can write about now.

This is far and away the best tool and deep research right now

I then repeated this experiment for 3 other queries

Does price anchoring actually work in sales?
Summarise peer-reviewed research from Google Scholar on decision-making under pressure and performance anxiety in elite athletes.
What does the latest research say about large language model scaling laws?

The results were the same each time. Claude was significantly better than both. I found myself tuning out after the first paragraph of ChatGPT consistently.

But with Claude it was really fascinating

The only way to explain it is that it feels like actual research and Google and ChatGPT feel like thin attempts at research.

A good example to show this is that when you ask a question, Claude will break down and assess your query.

Here is an example

This is a Depth-first query. The core question is “How do I successfully build a Medium account for AI/tech content to 5,000 followers?” This benefits from multiple perspectives:

Platform mechanics perspective (how Medium works)
Content creation perspective (what to write)
Growth hacking perspective (how to distribute and promote)
Community building perspective (engagement and relationships)
Data-driven perspective (metrics, timelines, case studies)

The interconnected nature of these sections means each component directly impacts the others. So I need to carefully consider and give weight to the more important question which I think comes down to what to write. If you figure that out then everything else will take care of itself.

Here are my takeaways for this week

If you have a task that you need some additional research on then use Claude.

It answered the questions the best of every domain I tested. I constantly was impressed and there was really no comparison to the other two.

Book Club AKA how to spend your extra Audible Credits

The Art of Thinking Clearly

This is a cool book with 100 different psychological biases. If you are a fan of Charlie Munger or Daniel Kahneman but also don’t want an overly dense book, then this is perfect. Each of the 100 biases is only 3 pages so it’s quite a fun read.

View it on Amazon here

The Truth About Pricing

This is a cool book if you like answering questions and thinking hard about your business and what you are doing. It pairs nicely with Positioning or The Boutique.

If you don’t want to put in any work then don’t buy it (that’s not a dig, it’s just meant to be read actively.)