Methodology & data sources

Every number on this site comes from public, keyless APIs — no scraping of protected search surfaces, no paid data resold. The scoring formula is deterministic and published below. If you disagree with a score, you can compute it yourself.

1. Sources

SourceWhat it tells usAccess
Wikimedia PageviewsPublic attention per topic — daily article views for every tracked entityofficial API · no key
GDELT DOC 2.0Global news volume over time — how much the world's press writes about a topicofficial API · no key
Google autocompleteLive demand expansion — the phrases real people type, used for keyword discoverypublic endpoint · polite rates
6 more suggest enginesPer-platform keyword ideas in the suggest toolpublic · cached 10 min

No SERP scraping of Google results. No paid search-volume resellers at this stage — if we add volume enrichment later, we'll disclose it per metric.

2. The score, in the open

Seasonality (day-of-week) is removed from every series before scoring. All inputs come from a 120-day daily history per topic.

growth     = mean(last 14d) vs mean(prior 14d), after de-seasonalizing
momentum   = OLS slope of last 14d, normalized by level
breakout   = max robust z-score of last 7d vs prior 30d (MAD-based)
agreement  = share of sources growing >10%   (confidence)
fad        = spike-and-decay shape detector  (penalty -25)
score      = 0.4*growth + 0.2*momentum + 0.2*breakout + 0.2*agreement
             -> scaled to 0..100, minus the fad penalty

3. Levels

LevelMeans
explodingscore ≥ 70 and growth > +25% — strong multi-signal acceleration
risingscore ≥ 55 — attention climbing faster than most tracked topics
steadyscore ≥ 35 — active, real demand, no spike
coolinggrowth < −15% — fading from a recent peak
flateverything else

4. Honest limits

Wikipedia attention and news volume are proxies for search demand — correlated, not identical. Autocomplete phrases show demand language, not volume. We don't fabricate absolute search numbers like some paid tools; we'd rather show fewer, honest signals. Data health for every source is logged in each weekly report.

5. Free API

The daily dataset is public JSON — no key, cached 5 minutes: GET /api/trends. Per-engine suggestions: GET /api/suggest?engine=google&q=… (120 req/min per IP). Deep long-tail mining: GET /api/mine?q=… (2 runs/min per IP, cached 24h). Explore trends in the trend grid.