Spotting trends before the competition can be a massive advantage. But how do you actually find trending topics early?

Most people will tell you to check social media, follow industry influencers, or read reports. But these methods have problems.

Social media is great at telling you what’s popular right now but not necessarily what will be popular next year, while influencers and industry reports are highly subjective and depend largely on what the authors think is interesting.

Given these, here are the best ways to spot trending topics before they go mainstream.

Use a Trend Spotting Website

Trend spotting websites take the time and guesswork out of spotting trends.

For example Glimpse, the best trend spotting website, analyzes hundreds of millions of consumer behavior signals from across the web to surface top trends before they go mainstream.

Let’s say you want to spot new beauty trends. Just enter “Beauty” into Glimpse’s Discover Trends section and you’ll immediately see dozens of emerging, high-growth beauty trends:

Glimpse surfaces true long-term trends—rather than fads that spike for a week then fall into oblivion—by looking at the historical Google search volume, arguably the best predictor of a trend’s future performance. If searches have been rising steadily over time, then it’s likely (though not certain!) that it will continue.

For example, searches for "exfoliating acid" have been growing steadily for years, so chances are this growth pattern will continue. If you want a data-driven prediction of what this growth might look like, then you can use the Forecast feature to see the trend’s projected trajectory over the next year:

This approach gives you the confidence to start longer-term projects, such as developing a product or forming strategy.

Only acting on trends that have validated interest long-term saves you a ton of time, as most of the “trends” you see online are actually just fads that will disappear next week. If you act on these, you’ll be in a perpetual cycle of disappointment.

Glimpse can also give you rich insights on a trend to help you plan your next move, like the most common searches alongside it and which social platforms it’s being discussed most on.

Plus, it’ll recommend related search trends in the same category for you to explore.

Lastly, if the trend is interesting, but maybe not a good fit right now, then you can track it and get alerted via email if it climbs more, alongside new trend recommendations.

Glimpse is the best way to find new trends. It’s objective, using real data rather than subjective opinions, and quick, helping you find promising topics in any industry in a fraction of the time.

Get started with Glimpse for free and spot your next trend in minutes.

Google Trends

Google Trends is often cited among the go-to tools for trend research. It’s a powerful tool built by Google to show the Google search interest in a topic over time, and it can be used for a range of use cases like product research, SEO/keyword research, and even stock market trading.

We’re big fans of Google Trends, but it has one key limitation when it comes to finding trending topics: it only shows you data on topics you already know about.

This means that finding a new trend that you haven’t heard of is extremely difficult. Its best use case is to research those topics you already know about and validate or invalidate them as trends. Therefore, when combined with other methods, like scanning social media and industry reports, it can be useful in the trend spotting process.

However, given that Glimpse is built on top of Google Trends, therefore providing all of its features plus loads more, the only real reason to use Google Trends instead is that it's completely free.

Social Media Platforms’ Trend Tools

An increasing number of social media platforms are releasing their own trend-tracking sections. Pinterest has their own version of Google Trends, while TikTok has its Creative Center and X has X Trends.

These tools are usually free and can be a great way to find what’s trending right now on the respective platforms.

For instance, Pinterest Trends will highlight keywords that have spiked in search popularity in the past week, while Creative Center will show you TikTok's top hashtags, songs, etc. this month.

Given the short-term nature of these trends, we’ve generally found these platforms to be useful for content creators looking to create trending content this week, but less so for those looking to develop a product or start longer-term projects.

Reddit Pro Trends

Reddit just launched a new free tool called Reddit Pro Trends that makes pulling data insights from Reddit a lot easier. It’s kind of like Google Trends for Reddit as it provides a longer-term view, unlike the social media tools mentioned above. You can search specific keywords and see data like conversation volume over time, active subreddits, and relevant discussions.

The core advantage of Reddit is the depth of understanding you can get about a given topic. Since you’re reading real user conversations, you can get a feel for how people think or feel about a topic, and that can spark new ideas you might not get from only the title of a topic.

The downside is that this is a lot of information. Poring over dozens or hundreds of Reddit threads and comments can be time consuming to say the least, and there’s a very low signal-to-noise ratio. Plus, like Google Trends, you can only explore topics you already know about.

For these reasons, we usually recommend Reddit as a second step to pull richer insights after discovering a topic with a dedicated trend spotting tool.

Scrolling Social Media

Despite its limitations, scrolling social media can still be a decent way to spot trends, especially if you have lots of time on your hands.

There will be a high signal-to-noise ratio, so you’ll have to spend a while looking through fluff to find something promising, and even then, it’s possible you’re just seeing a fad rather than something long-term. However, there are a couple ways you can improve your chances.

First, create a dedicated account for each category you want to stay on top of, then curate your feed for trending content in that niche by following the leading influencers and liking relevant content.

Once you do spot something promising, use a tool like Glimpse to view the search volume over time and confirm it’s actually a long-term trend like this:

As opposed to a fad like this:

Conclusion

And that's it! Hopefully this list of trend spotting tools and methods helped you learn how to better spot trends across the internet.

For a comparison of specific tools, see our top trend spotting websites and tools.

FAQ

What is the best way to find trending topics?

We believe that Glimpse is the best way to find trends, especially for those developing products, doing market research, or anything that involves longer-term thinking.