What makes you determine whether a feature request is a pattern?

"User requesting some feature." This is an observation. "Ten users requesting very similar features." This is a pattern. It took me way too long to figure out that our five most frequently requested features were actually the same one feature under different names because the exact wording was never the same.

I figured this out while manually re-reading three months of support tickets on a lazy Sunday morning, which clearly isn't a scalable solution. I wonder how other people find such patterns without filtering out all the important signals or being alarmed by everything coming in as a request.

Are you tagging incoming requests by their themes, are you analyzing them periodically or is there any automation going on there? Wouldn't it be nice to get a good habit before quarterly archaeology?