How to find trending topics

Did you buy a Labubu before everyone suddenly had one? Or were you the last person in the friend group to see the Instagram post from Lisa from K-pop band Blackpink cuddling hers? Could you have explained “6-7” before your niblings and their grade-school friends were suddenly wobbling their hands and yelling out the numbers for no apparent reason? (Can you even explain it now?)

Modern wisdom tells us that once elder generations become aware of a trend, it’s already peaked. And without naming any generations in particular, the fact of the matter is, that, if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the elders.

Fortunately, we have tools that can help us spot trends like these early — and not only to help us keep our youthful demeanors.

If you’re wondering how to stay on top of trending topics, how to make good use of them upon discovery, and what tools to use to find them, keep reading.

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The phases of a topic trend: Regular, exploding, peaked

Trending topics move through predictable lifecycles. Knowing how topics grow, explode, and eventually reach their peak can help you spot trends early enough to jump on board before some new trend comes along.

Here’s the basic anatomy of a trending lifecycle:

1. Regular: The topic gains slow-but-steady interest over time, pushing baseline demand up little by little. Savvy analysts who have solid first-to-market concepts are in a good position to take advantage of future upside here.
2. Exploding: As more and more people start to notice the trend, it begins to accelerate, and eventually it grows so fast that it seems like one day suddenly everyone knows about it. At the start of this period, competition is relatively low, but increasing, and quick responders can capitalize on the exploding popularity.
3. Peaked: Once most people are aware of the trend, the relevant markets have become saturated with commercial offerings. People are already starting to lose interest and looking for the next trend to grow on.

What does this look like in the real world? 

Below is the Google trends graph for the topic “large language model” (LLM) since the beginning of 2016. While people have been aware of LLMs for longer than that, interest rose steadily until there was a bump in search interest early in 2025 with a sudden explosion beginning around September 2025 and a possible peak in May 2026.

Compare this to the topic of “AI,” which has been exploding since around late 2022. 

This is helpful for seeing how an “explosion” can actually take place over a longer timeframe. It’s okay to jump on a trend even as it’s starting to explode, because there often is still a lot of upside before it eventually peaks.

Occasionally, a second trend lifecycle may form when a trend gains renewed interest after a few weeks, months, or even years. It’s often caused by a callback to the original trend that stokes renewed interest or ventures into a new group that was unaware of the initial trend. Second-life trends can have bigger interest than the original trend, such as when they break out of a niche group into a more general audience — e.g., children saying “6-7” without understanding the source of the phrase — but they often tend to have shorter lifecycles than the initial trend. 

Finally, although the phases of a topic trend are predictable, their timing often is not. Some trends take off really quickly, with short regular and exploding phases, reaching their peaks in almost no time. Others may grow for a long time, like the interest in LLMs and AI, before finally taking off and presenting an opportunity to receive a return on investment.

Why the exploding phase is the one worth catching

The real sweet spot of catching a trend is the exploding phase, that short burst of high-growth, low-competition activity and awareness between when a trend first starts growing to its eventual and inevitable peak.

That’s because, when it comes to SEO and AI search visibility, the exploding phase provides a prime opportunity to shape and define the messaging of the trend itself.

While a topic trend is still growing, there is often little or no settled terminology. A brand that can jump in early will benefit by having an opportunity to:

• Define the phrases that come into everyday use
• Build a narrative around those everyday phrases
• And capture traffic from those new (or newly defined) phrases

To see a clear example of how to catch a trending topic in its exploding phase, just look at the example of Uber and the now-ubiquitous (if somewhat controversial) practice of surge pricing.

The concept of dynamic pricing has been around for a long time. Before the advent of smartphones, however, it was mainly restricted to a few industries like hospitality and transportation, and the “dynamic” nature of the pricing was based on:

• Long-term or annual trends, such as seasonal or holiday data
• One-time unplanned usage increases, such as high energy usage during extreme weather 
• Occasional planned usage increases, such as more traffic during major events and celebrations

Mobile apps have allowed companies to collect massive amounts of data that was previously unavailable to them. With that came the ability to find new “events,” or triggers, that they could use to dynamically price their products and services.

Uber certainly was not the only one to jump on the dynamic pricing trend. However, the ride-hailing app helped to define the trend by coining the term “surge pricing” and carrying it into the other industries where it now operates, including food delivery, courier services, freight transportation, and logistics, among others.

Today, the term is not only a part of everyday language, but Uber has also shaped how people use it. Knowing that some people found the practice to be controversial, the company was able to promote messaging around their transparency of surge pricing in their app, which they claimed would give consumers the information they needed to make decisions about how and when to use the service without overspending.

The upshot of this is that Uber still gets the highest branded search visibility “surge pricing” queries in both AI search and traditional search engine results — all because they jumped on the trend as it was exploding and provided a useful, memorable message.

Of course, everyone from CEOs on down knows that it’s important to jump on trends early. The real trick is finding those trends while they’re still in the regular phase and being in place to optimize your advantage as they start to explode.

Where to find trending topics: Tools and tactics

Although we’re bombarded by new trends every day, finding trending topics before they explode requires a proactive approach. And that means using specific tools and tactics to dig into the areas that matter most to you and your brand.

Some of the best trending-topic tools and tactics being used right now are:

• TikTok Creative Center: A free resource for TikTok creators and advertisers to dive into emerging trends across its creator base
• Google Search Console: An analytics tool to measure your website’s performance and uncover growing interest based on keywords and topics
• Reddit and other forums: Discussions about anything and everything, often good for identifying topics of interest
• Exploding Topics: A dedicated tool for uncovering under-the-radar trends, new startups and products, and emerging markets
• Niche monitoring: News websites, blogs, podcasts, and other media related to your industry and interests
• Competitor monitoring: Press releases, news, and blog posts, as well as brand visibility, backlinks, and mentions across the web

Let’s look at each of these tools and tactics a little closer.

TikTok Creative Center

The TikTok for Business Creative Center gives advertisers and creators a simple way to discover current trends.

Simply visit TikTok Creative Center and log in, then click “Trends” in the main menu. You should be on the “Hashtag” view by default — if not, click it to view the list of trending topics by hashtag.

At a quick glance, you can see the top 100 trending hashtags with information about:

• The hashtag’s industry (or industries) beneath the hashtag
• Total posts
• Total views
• Short-term trendline
• Top creators for the topic

To see only hashtags from a specific industry, click the dropdown on the left and select the industry you want to view.

The list of available industries includes:

• Apparel & Accessories
• Baby, Kids & Maternity
• Beauty & Personal Care
• Education
• Food & Beverage
• Games
• Health
• Home Improvement
• Household Products
• News & Entertainment
• Pets
• Sports & Outdoor
• Tech & Electronics
• Vehicle & Transportation

You can also adjust the time frame to cover the last 7, 30, or 90 days.

By combining these different views, you can quickly see which topics are new trends that might be worth jumping on versus those that have already peaked.

For example, as of the time of writing, the Beauty & Personal Care industry was seeing a prevalence of dental-related videos on TikTok.

All of these hashtags had low post and view numbers compared to the #payday trend, and their trendlines showed continued interest with small dips and spikes.

You’d also want to look at the “Last 30 days” and “Last 90 days” views to see if the dental-related hashtags appeared in the top 100 list. This would help indicate if they were a new or longstanding trend.

To get more information about a specific hashtag, you can click on the “See analytics” button at the end of the row.

In addition to a larger trend chart, you’ll be able to see:

• Popular videos related to the topic
• A breakdown of the age ranges interested in the topic
• Where the topic is trending around the world

Looking at an acne-related example that was topping the charts in early July, the zoomed-in trendline shows that a week earlier, the hashtag had effectively zero views. A couple gentle rises pushed it up, followed by short, narrow dips — but no sharp spikes or peaks.

Looking deeper at the data shows that the largest group interested in the topic is users over 35. This group accounts for about 34% of TikTok users according to Sprout Social, while the other two age groups (18-24 and 25-34) together account for about 66% of TikTok’s user base.

Which means that if those other groups start to take notice, there could still be a lot of upside to this emerging trend.

The demographic data also shows where in the world the hashtag is popular. Once you identify an emerging trend, you can be ready for it when it breaks out into other regions, or even shape its emergence in areas where you have a presence.

Finally, because viral content on TikTok often jumps to other platforms, such as Reels on Instagram and Facebook or YouTube Shorts, finding trends in the regular or about to explode phases on TikTok can give you a distinct advantage beyond just that platform.

Google Search Console

If you’re looking for trends that hit close to home, a good place to check is the Insights Report in Google Search Console.

To find the report:

1. Select “Insights.”
2. Adjust the time frame as desired.
3. Choose the “Trending up” tab under “Queries leading to your site.”

Here, you will see a list of keywords that are currently showing an upward trend of interest from organic results.

To dig into the data further, click on a query. The resulting report will show a comparison chart of the time period selected and details about the pages that the query is sending traffic to.

The trend itself might be part of a broader trend worth investigating. Or the trend might be an indicator of interest among your own specific audience.

If you start to see impressions growing before you see clicks coming into the site, this could be an indicator of a larger trend. It’s worth investigating what the search results for those queries are showing and making sure that your pages are in a good place to capture both traffic and conversions when the trend explodes.

Reddit and forum comment mining

Digging through recent discussions forum sites can yield insights into trending interests and frustrations, especially among niche groups.

When people need help, want advice, or are looking for details they can’t seem to find anywhere else, they often turn to forums like Reddit, Quora, or Stack Overflow.

The problem is that these forums are so big, it can be overwhelming to find trending topics across the entire forum. A more manageable solution requires becoming a part of the communities and discussions that are most relevant to your business.

Here’s what that looks like on Reddit.

The first thing to know is that you can order your feed to show posts with rising interest. Simply select the dropdown at the top left of the feed and choose “Rising” to reorder the posts.

This is useful for seeing individual discussions that are starting to trend. That said, just because a post has rising interest doesn’t mean it’s trending outside of Reddit or even the specific subreddit where the post lives.

The “Rising” filter can be used in specific subreddits, as well. For example, if you want to see growing conversations about Google, simply join the r/google subreddit and select “Rising.”

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Note: Unfortunately, Reddit does not allow you to set “Rising” as the default sort order. You’ll have to change it manually any time you visit a particular subreddit or search.

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Another way to see trending topics on Reddit is in the search bar. When you click “Find anything,” a dropdown will appear with a list of recent subreddits, followed by what’s trending now.

As shown in the screenshot below, the first few trending topics are based on your interests, including the communities you’ve joined. 

One place that might seem a bit counterintuitive to check is the r/OutOfTheLoop subreddit, again sorted by rising interest.

This subreddit is specifically designed for people to ask about things they’re hearing about from colleagues, news outlets, and elsewhere, but they don’t really understand what’s going on with the topic. New and unanswered questions here could indicate that interest is still growing in a topic, but has not yet exploded or peaked, since people are still asking questions about it.

Once you uncover the communities and discussions you want to monitor, finding growing and exploding topics requires a little more digging.

The real value is in uncovering the follow-up questions that people are asking inside the posts:

• Are they highlighting related points of confusion?
• Are they struggling with similar technical problems when it comes to configuration, implementation, and effectiveness?
• Are they pointing out a lack of alternatives or competitors?

Noticing the themes in follow-up questions could help you recognize ways to jump into the discussion right then and there, while also giving you a chance to work the trend into your content strategy.

Exploding Topics

Semrush’s Exploding Topics app is a tool that’s dedicated to helping people find trending topics before they really take off. It monitors topics from across the web — from brands and products to startups and non-branded interests — and provides an easy way to discover and track trends that impact your niche.

The quickest way to get into finding trends is to start with the trends database. You can search on a specific keyword or topic, or dive down into specific industries and segments.

For example, if you want to look at trends in the mental health space, go to Trends Database > Health & Wellness > Mental Health.

The database consists of more than 1.1 million emerging trends across a lot of different areas, including business, technology, entertainment, fashion, finance, and much more.

You can also create projects to track trends and build reports that help you stay in touch with the topics you care about.

For a full tutorial, see “How to find trending topics: An example tutorial” below.

Monitoring what your competitors publish

If your competitors are all talking about a topic and you aren’t, you’ve definitely missed a trend somewhere. Keeping tabs on what they’re pushing out to the world is critical not only for catching trends early, but for ensuring you don’t lag dangerously behind.

The top three ways you can keep abreast of competitor content is:

1. Monitoring their sitemap
2. Scheduling regular crawls of their site for new content
3. Setting up Google Alerts to monitor domain mentions

Sitemaps

Sitemaps contain information about the newest and most recently updated content on a website. This is a great source of information that can provide insight about a competitor’s current priorities and possibly even future moves.

When looking at sitemaps, especially consider the following:

• News, blog posts, and press releases: Especially pay attention when similar messages are being pushed across multiple outreach platforms, as it indicates a strategic shift in messaging and may signal upcoming product, service, or company changes.
• New and updated product pages: Pages may be pushed in preparation for significant updates or new features.
• Revamped “evergreen” content: Changes to pages that were first published a while ago can be an indication of trying to take advantage of a new trend or emerging topic.

As for where to find a sitemap, unless your competitors are actively hiding from Google and AI crawlers, they will likely keep it in an obvious spot.

Here are a few suggestions on where to look:

• Root domain: Most websites keep their sitemaps in a sitemap.xml file at the root level (e.g., https://example.com/sitemap.xml)
• Subdomain: If your competitor has multiple subdomains, they may have a separate sitemap for each one (e.g., https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml, https://app.example.com/sitemap.xml, etc.)
• Check robots.txt: If you can’t find the sitemap in an obvious spot, check for a Sitemap: line in their robots.txt file

Scheduled SEO crawls

If, for some reason, your competitor doesn’t have a sitemap, or their sitemap doesn’t cover their entire site, you can schedule an SEO crawl using a tool like Semrush Site Audit or Screaming Frog.

As with sitemap monitoring, the key goal is to find trends among new and updated content. 

For example, you might find that a competitor is trying to take advantage of a trending topic if an SEO crawl uncovers:

• A blog post about the topic
• A press release announcing new features related to the topic
• Updates to product pages and support materials relevant to the topic

If you’re not already aware of what the trend is, then this is a good indicator that you should start researching it right away.

Google Alerts with domain monitoring

Another way to keep tabs on what competitors are up to is to set up a Google Alert that monitors their domain.

This is easy to do, since Google Alerts supports the site: operator in search results. Setting up an alert like site:example.com will ensure that you get notified whenever a new page on the site pops into the search results.

Don’t sleep on the other options, either. 

1. Click the “Show options” dropdown next to the email field.
2. Review the options to ensure they reflect your desired settings.
3. Especially pay attention to the “How many” field. Change “Only the best results” to “All results” if you want to get alerts about every page.

Once your alerts are set up, review them on a regular basis to see how competitors are responding to trends so that you don’t miss out on something good.

Monitoring related niches

As you’re figuring out what trends to follow, make sure you’re looking beyond your own industry to your nearest neighbors, as well. 

Topics that recently peaked in a niche adjacent to yours, but which haven’t reached your own area yet, may offer a preview of how those same trends are likely to grow, explode, and peak in your own niche. 

For example:

• Trends across fin-tech might spread to slower-moving industries, such as ed-tech or healthcare apps
• Hair care content will often show up in beauty-related areas, such as skin care, or general wellness and personal care
• Entertainment, media, and fashion often start trends that influence both retailers and online creators

And vice versa, of course.

Look especially closely at the direction in which past trends have traveled. Observe which industries consistently jump on new ideas before yours, and which ones tend to lag. 

For example, if you’re focused on movies and television, it’s a good idea to understand what’s happening in the gaming world. Over the last 20 years or so, movies have tended to follow games in terms of visual styles, world-building, and long-running serial stories — even when the movies aren’t direct game adaptations. If you know what’s popular in gaming now, you’ll likely have a better understanding of what movies and shows will be popular in the next year or two.

Focus on leveraging trends as they’re starting to make the crossover.

Use the same tools for those niches as you use for your own industry:

• Run their keywords and related queries through Google Trends or Exploding Topics and see what peaked in the last six to 12 months.
• Follow their top publishers, subreddits, and newsletters.
• Identify the content formats that have taken off in those other industries that might not yet be common in your own area, such as calculators, comparison frameworks, “state of the market” reports, etc.

Just like monitoring competitors, monitoring related niches can give you good insights into topics that are getting ready to explode in your own niche.

AI-engine querying

As AI platforms become more powerful and capable of ingesting new training data more quickly, engineering a set of AI prompts that reveal current topics in your space can be a good way to spot trends before they explode.

A few key things to remember when building out your queries:

• Phrase your prompts like a real person, not like an SEO who has been doing SEO things for a decade or two.
• Keep your core list the same over time so that you can compare apples to apples.
• Run the same prompts across multiple platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

If you stick to a regular cadence (e.g., every week or two), you’ll start to notice how AI picks up on trends over time. In particular, you’ll be able to see which tools are better at finding trends early and which ones tend to be late on the uptake.

Some opportunity signals to look out for in the responses:

• Weak answers: Short, generic, or tentative responses without concrete examples or details likely means the topic is not well covered across the training data. This indicates a content gap you can fill.
• Poor citations: When generative tools pull in low-quality or a small number of sources, it means they haven’t found any good content that directly answers the prompt. Writing the authoritative article on the topic could put you at the forefront of future prompts. 
• Answer evolution: When a prompt returns little or nothing one month but has a genuine response with fresh citations, including new domains, it means that interest in the topic is starting to pick up. 

Remember that the goal here is to catch trending topics before they explode and ultimately peak. Depending on your cadence and how often these tools are updating their training data, you may only get one chance to notice a small increase in topic volume before it’s too late to jump on.

How to find trending topics: An example tutorial

Here’s how to find trending topics using Semrush Exploding Topics.

First:

1. Go to the Trend Tracking tab and create your first project. 
2. Edit the project name to something you’ll remember.
3. Then, click “+ Add Topics.”

You’ll be taken to the Trends Database tab. Here, you can drill down into specific industries and segments to find the trends that best fit your needs.

Using the dropdowns along the top, you can adjust which trends you see as follows:

• Sort: By growth over the time period, the trend line showing average growth, the date the trend was discovered, high-volume trends, or low-volume trends
• Timeframe: By 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years
• Growth: By regular, exploding, or peaked trends
• Type: By brands, non-brands, or both
• Volatility: By stable growth or both stable and volatile (less consistent) growth

For example, if you’re looking for non-brand trends over the last two years that were recently discovered and are exploding in interest with relatively stable volume, you’ll get a set of topics that looks like the one below.

Play around with the filters and pay attention to how they change what shows up.

Now, let’s say smart litter boxes are the thing you really want to track:

1. Click the “Track Topic” button on the bottom right corner of the trend box
2. Check the box next to the project you want to add it to.
3. Alternatively, select “+ New Project” to add it to a new project.

Add a few more trends to track, then go back to the “Trend Tracking” tab and click “View Project.” 

Your trends will show up in a table, giving you easy access to compare them together.

To look specifically for products, head to the “Trending Products” tab on the left. 

Here, you can filter by:

• Timeframe: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2, years, 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years
• Category: All or any one of the supported industries in the trends database
• Growth: Regular, Exploding, or Peaked
• Volume: Google search volume ranges, including Low (10-1,000), Medium (1,001-10,000), High (10,001-100,000), or Very High (100,001+)
• Amazon Revenue: Increasing ranges from below $5,000 to over $1 million
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR): Increasing ranges from below 1,000 to over 500,000
• Amazon Price: Increasing ranges from below $20 to over $1,000
• Amazon Reviews: Average rating from one-star and up to four-stars and up

Scroll down until you find a product that strikes your fancy.

Click on the row to get a detailed view of the product, including a product overview, zoomed in on trend chart with a one-year forecast, key metrics, top sellers, and related products.

You can also see related trends, which can give you more specific ideas — such as branded versions, if you’re viewing a non-branded trend — or similar trends to follow.

If you’re interested in trends on TikTok, the “TikTok Insights” tab lets you search by hashtag and filter by views growth, timeframe, and category.

Another interesting way to explore the data is within the “Meta Trends” tab. This tool combines related trends into overarching themes, which you can then explore.

The inner ring indicates the micro trends that make up the trend group. The outer ring shows adjacent trends that might be worth exploring. You can also see related meta trends to the left of the graphic.

Finally, if you want to receive email alerts about trends from Exploding Topics, click the gear icon at the top right of any page and click the “Allow email notifications” toggle.

How to automate trending topic discovery: For technical teams (optional)

If you’re expecting to deal with large sets of topics, keywords, or trends — such as in an enterprise environment — automation is critical for managing the workload.

The good news is, if you’re familiar with pulling data via REST APIs, you can automate a workflow to monitor trends using the Exploding Topics API alongside the Semrush Keyword API. 

The basic workflow looks like this:

1. Get a list of exploding trends from Exploding Topics API

Use the get topics call to retrieve a list of topics based on your preferred parameters:

• type: exploding
• categories: The specific category (or categories) you want to query
• sort: date_added
• order: desc
• timeframe: in months

See the documentation for a list of other options and values.

2. Get keyword metrics on exploding topics with Semrush Keyword API

For each topic received from the Exploding Topics API, use the Semrush Keyword API to get keyword metrics for that keyword.

• keyword: The topic name as retrieved from Exploding Topics
• country: The two-letter country code (e.g., US, UK, etc.)
• month: Defaults to the current month, otherwise provide it in the format YYYY-MM

3. Analyze the results

The Semrush Keyword API will include SEO and keyword research data that you can use to validate if the trends are starting to appear in search results, including:

• Search intent
• Keyword difficulty
• Search volume
• SERP features
• Search interest (trend) over the last 12 months

Once you get the hang of analyzing the resulting data, you’ll be able to hook it into your production pipeline. And then, you’ll be unstoppable.

Get the biggest bang from Exploding Topics

Trend cycles are shortening, and it’s becoming harder and harder to jump on a regular trend before it explodes and quickly reaches its peak. Having tools, tactics, and a strategy that helps you update your content and get new products before the eyes of customers is critical to survival in the increasingly hectic trend marketplace.

So why not get a tool that makes the entire process easier? An easy way to start is by signing up for Semrush’s Exploding Topics now.

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