We tried a number of trend discovery platforms, and after failing to find one that found trends early on, we decided to build Exploding Topics.

Below, we'll give you an overview of how it works, and then we'll discuss how it checks the boxes of the four criteria outlined above.

How Exploding Topics Works

Exploding Topics' flagship feature is the Trends Database, a searchable database of over 1M trending topics.

You can sort the database by category (e.g., beauty, finance, food, gaming, retail) and filter by trend growth status (Exploding, Peaked, and Regular), which is determined by Google search data.

If you find an interesting trend, you can save it to a Project by clicking "Track Topic." Projects live in the main dashboard and make it easy to monitor a trend's growth status over time.

Exploding Topics offers a handful of other features as well. However, let's first discuss how each trend is sourced and qualified, as this is a significant reason why Exploding Topics is a premium trend discovery tool.

How Exploding Topics Identifies and Qualifies Trends

A key differentiator between Exploding Topics and other trend tools is that it uses a combination of AI and human analysts to find and approve topics before adding them to the Trends Database.

Here's how it works:

• AI scrapes data from sources like Reddit, Quora, Google Search, Amazon, YouTube, podcasts, and other news sources to identify popular topics. It then flags popular topics for human analysis.
• A human then researches each flagged topic and approves only those that have shown steady growth over an extended period of time and have business value.

AI is perhaps the most effective method for creating a thorough list of trending topics, as it can quickly scrape millions of web pages. So while AI is unlikely to miss any promising trends, the downside is that it will also probably capture a lot of irrelevant topics too.

For example, it will likely pull a lot of pop culture topics like movies, celebrity news, or songs that have little to no business value. So our "secret sauce" to providing only high-quality trends is using a human analyst to confirm each topic has business value. This way, you don't waste time sifting through irrelevant topics and only see high-quality industry trends.

In addition, we wanted to use data to qualify each industry trend. So instead of just adding any trends that our analysts find interesting or using data from a limited sample size, we use Google search volume to determine trend growth.

Google Search volume is perhaps the most reliable method to measure trend growth as it measures the global population's interest in that keyword for as far back as 10 years.

If a keyword has shown steady growth over the past several years (the default is five years), it will probably continue to grow for years to come. While this isn’t always the case, we’ve found search data to be the most reliable data to gauge a trend’s potential.

Additional Features

The Trends Database is our flagship feature, though you'll also find a handful of other helpful features that make it easy to identify and confirm trends. Here are a few of them:

Trend Analysis

The main value of Exploding Topics is that it brings trends to your attention (including trends you weren't aware of yet). However, we realize you might already have a topic in mind and just want to see whether or not it's trending. So with Trends Search, you can type in any keyword and generate a report of its historical search volume trend in real time along with other related topics.

Meta Trends

When a new popular product or company enters the market, it's often due to a broader industry trend. For example, the explosive growth that companies like Beastcoast and Fnatic are experiencing is likely thanks to the growth of the larger Meta Trend, eSports training. So to help you uncover the more encompassing industry trend, we built Meta Trends.

Trend Hunter offers a database of trends that allows you to search by topic (e.g., Fashion, Tech, Culture, Design).

If you find an interesting trend, you can click on it to see a basic definition and a handful of images.

It uses AI to scrape the web and find new topics. If the team thinks the topic is interesting, they add it to the trend database.

Once a topic is added, you'll see the following metrics:

• Popularity: Based on user upvotes
• Activity: Based on weekly clicks
• Freshness: Based on how recently it was added

These metrics are internal and based on Trend Hunter’s user base, so they are not globally reliable.

Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to get trend data on any keyword, including:

• Search volume patterns
• Search demographic data
• Related topics suggestions
• Related queries suggestions

It is excellent for analyzing known trends, though less useful for surfacing brand-new ones.