How to Find Trending Keywords for SEO (7 Methods)

In this article, you’ll learn seven practical methods to find trending keywords before your competitors do, how to validate those keywords before committing to content, and how to spot emerging topics in AI search — a channel that most SEO teams still ignore.

What Are Trending Keywords?

Trending keywords are search terms experiencing a noticeable increase in search volume over a recent period. They differ from evergreen keywords (which maintain steady volume year-round) and seasonal keywords (which spike predictably at the same time each year).

A trending keyword might be a brand-new term (“ChatGPT” in late 2022), an emerging subtopic within an established niche (“AI-generated headshots” within photography), or an older term suddenly gaining renewed interest due to current events.

The key distinction: trending keywords are growing right now, which means the competition hasn’t fully caught up yet.

1. Start With Google Trends

Google Trends is free, fast, and the most obvious starting point. It shows how search interest for any term has changed over time, broken down by region and category.

Here’s how to use it properly — not just casually.

Step 1: Enter a broad topic keyword. Start with something relevant to your niche. If you sell fitness equipment, type “home gym.” If you run a SaaS blog, try “AI tools.”

Step 2: Adjust the timeframe. The default is 12 months, but you’ll often get better trend signals from shorter windows. Switch to “Past 90 days” or “Past 30 days” to spot recent spikes that haven’t yet matured into established topics.

Step 3: Check “Related queries.” This is the most useful part of Google Trends and the part most people skip. Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the Related queries section. Switch to the “Rising” tab instead of “Top.”

Look for queries labeled “Breakout.” That label means the search term has grown by more than 5,000% over your selected timeframe. These are your highest-signal opportunities — topics with explosive growth that are still early enough to target.

Step 4: Compare multiple keywords. Google Trends lets you compare up to five terms side by side. This is useful for spotting which variation of a topic is actually trending. For example, “AI image generator” vs. “AI art generator” vs. “AI photo editor” might reveal that one variant is growing much faster than the others.

The limitation of Google Trends: It only shows relative interest, not actual search volumes. And the Related queries section typically surfaces only 25 rising terms — useful, but not comprehensive. For a deeper list, you need a dedicated keyword research tool.

2. Use a Keyword Research Tool With Growth Metrics

Google Trends gives you direction. A keyword research tool gives you data.

Most keyword tools now include some form of growth or trend metric that lets you sort keywords by how fast their search volume is increasing. This is how you go from “I think this topic is trending” to “This keyword grew 340% in the last three months and has a keyword difficulty of 12.”

Here’s the general approach, regardless of which tool you use:

Step 1: Enter a seed keyword. Start with a broad term related to your niche — the same one you used in Google Trends.

Step 2: Navigate to the keyword ideas or matching terms report. Every tool calls this something different, but you’re looking for the report that shows you a large list of related keywords with their metrics.

Step 3: Sort by growth or trend. Look for a column labeled “Growth,” “Trend,” or “Volume Change.” Sort descending to surface keywords with the largest recent increase in search volume.

Step 4: Filter to find actionable opportunities. A keyword growing at 500% but with only 10 monthly searches might not be worth your time yet. Apply filters to narrow down:

• Minimum search volume (e.g., 100+ monthly searches) to ensure there’s enough demand

• Maximum keyword difficulty to focus on terms you can realistically rank for

• Include/exclude specific words to stay relevant to your niche

Step 5: Check the SERP for each candidate. Before you commit to a keyword, look at who’s currently ranking. If the top 10 results are all from massive sites with thousands of backlinks, that trending keyword might not be as accessible as the growth metric suggests. But if you see forums, thin content, or smaller sites ranking — that’s a green light.

The best keyword tools show you the full SERP for each keyword, including the ranking pages’ domain authority, backlink count, and estimated traffic. Use that data to decide whether to pursue the keyword.

You can use Analyze AI’s free Keyword Generator to brainstorm seed keywords, and the SERP Checker to analyze who’s ranking for any term you’re considering.

3. Monitor Reddit and Niche Communities

Keyword tools show you what people are already searching for. Reddit shows you what people are starting to talk about — often before search volume materializes.

The logic is simple: conversations on Reddit, niche forums, and community platforms often precede search behavior. Someone asks about a new tool, product, or technique. Others pile on. Within weeks, people start searching for it on Google.

Here’s how to mine Reddit for trending keyword ideas:

Step 1: Find relevant subreddits. Enter a topic keyword in Reddit’s search bar and look at the “Communities” results. For SEO, you’d find subreddits like r/SEO, r/bigseo, and r/digital_marketing. For cooking, r/Cooking, r/recipes, r/MealPrepSunday.

Step 2: Sort by “Top” for a recent time period. Once you’re inside a relevant subreddit, sort by “Top” and select “This Week” or “This Month.” This surfaces the discussions getting the most engagement right now.

Step 3: Look for patterns, not just individual posts. A single popular post about “AI-powered email outreach” could be a fluke. But if you see three or four posts about it across different subreddits in the same week, that’s a trend signal.

Pay attention to:

• Posts with high upvote counts and active comment sections

• Questions that get asked repeatedly (“Has anyone tried X?”)

• Complaints about existing solutions (“I wish there was a tool that did Y”)

• New product or technique names that keep appearing

Step 4: Validate with a keyword tool. Take the topics you’ve found and check whether people are searching for them yet. Enter the phrase into your keyword tool or Analyze AI’s Keyword Rank Checker to see if there’s existing search volume.

Even if the volume is low (say, 50–200 monthly searches), that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. If the trend is clearly upward and the topic is relevant to your audience, getting in early means you’ll rank as the keyword matures.

Beyond Reddit: Don’t limit yourself to Reddit alone. Depending on your niche, you might find better trend signals on platforms like Hacker News (technology), Product Hunt (SaaS), specialized Discord servers, or industry-specific forums.

4. Track Social Media Trends

Social media platforms are trend factories. Topics that go viral on X (Twitter), TikTok, or Instagram often translate into search volume within days or weeks.

The challenge is filtering signal from noise. Not every viral moment turns into a keyword opportunity. Here’s how to approach each platform:

X (Twitter)

Use the Explore tab. Click “Explore” and you’ll see a “For You” tab that surfaces trending topics based on your interests. The problem is that this is heavily influenced by your personal algorithm. A better approach is to search for your niche topic directly and sort by “Top” to see what’s getting the most engagement.

Follow niche thought leaders. The fastest way to spot trends on X is to follow the people who create them. In SEO, that might be well-known practitioners and founders. In your niche, identify the 10–15 people who consistently share what’s new and add them to a private list.

TikTok

Use the Creative Center. If you have a TikTok Business account, the Creative Center shows you what’s trending in real time — including trending hashtags, songs, and creator content. Focus on the hashtags and topics, not the songs.

Search for your niche. Even without a Business account, you can search for topics on TikTok and sort by date to see what’s gaining traction. TikTok trends tend to skew younger demographics, so consider whether the audience aligns with your target market.

Instagram

Instagram doesn’t surface trends as explicitly as X or TikTok. Your best bet is to search for your niche and navigate to the Tags tab to see which hashtags are growing. Click through to the top posts under each hashtag to understand what’s driving engagement.

The critical next step

Social media trends are noisy. Before you invest time creating content around a trending topic you found on social media, run it through a keyword research tool to verify that it has actual search volume — or at least shows signs of growing search interest via Google Trends.

Not everything that trends on TikTok becomes a search query. But when it does, you want to be first.

5. Use Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask

This method is underrated because it’s so simple. But Google’s own suggestions are a direct window into what searchers are looking for right now.

Google Autocomplete updates in near real-time based on actual search behavior. When you start typing a query, Google suggests completions based on what other people are searching for. New suggestions that appear — ones that weren’t there a few months ago — are often trending keywords.

Here’s how to use it systematically:

Step 1: Type your seed keyword followed by each letter of the alphabet. For example, type “AI tools for a,” then “AI tools for b,” then “AI tools for c,” and so on. Each letter reveals a different set of autocomplete suggestions.

Step 2: Document every suggestion that’s new or unfamiliar. If you’ve been in your niche for a while, you’ll recognize the established terms. The ones you don’t recognize are your potential trending keywords.

Step 3: Check “People Also Ask” boxes. When you search for your seed keyword, scroll down to the “People Also Ask” section. These questions are dynamically generated based on user behavior, and they often include emerging queries.

Click on a few questions to expand them — this triggers Google to load more related questions. You can keep expanding to uncover dozens of related queries, some of which may be newly trending.

For a deeper analysis of how People Also Ask works and how to optimize for it, see our guide on People Also Ask: 5 Ways to Optimize & Track PAA in AI Search.

Step 4: Use a free autocomplete tool for scale. Manually typing every letter combination gets tedious. Free tools like AnswerThePublic pull autocomplete data at scale, giving you a visual map of every question, preposition, and comparison query related to your seed keyword.

You can also use Analyze AI’s Keyword Generator to quickly expand any seed keyword into a broader set of related terms, including long-tail variations that might be trending.

6. Analyze Your Competitors’ New and Rising Content

Your competitors are doing keyword research too. When they publish new content, they’ve likely identified a keyword worth targeting. By monitoring what they’re publishing, you can piggyback on their research and sometimes beat them by publishing better content faster.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Identify 5–10 competitors. These should be sites that rank for the same keywords you’re targeting (or want to target). Include both direct business competitors and content competitors — sites that compete for the same search traffic even if they don’t sell the same product.

For a deeper process, see our guide on SEO competitor analysis.

Step 2: Check their blog or content section regularly. Visit each competitor’s blog at least once a week. Look at what they’ve published recently. New articles often signal trending topics they’ve spotted.

Step 3: Use a keyword tool to find their recently ranking keywords. Most SEO tools let you see which keywords a domain has recently started ranking for. This is more precise than just browsing their blog — it shows you which of their new articles are actually gaining traction in search.

Step 4: Run a content gap analysis. A content gap analysis shows you keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t. When filtered for keywords with recent growth, this reveals trending topics that your competitors have covered and you haven’t — giving you a clear to-do list.

Step 5: Look for patterns. If three of your competitors all published articles about the same new topic in the past month, that topic is almost certainly trending. The more competitors that jump on a topic simultaneously, the stronger the trend signal.

7. Curate an Industry Newsletter

This final method isn’t a quick trick. It’s a long-term habit that makes every other method on this list more effective.

When you curate a newsletter — whether it’s a public newsletter for your audience, an internal digest for your team, or even just a personal collection of links — you force yourself to stay on top of everything happening in your industry.

Here’s why it works: to curate a good newsletter, you have to read broadly. You scan social media, browse industry publications, check forums, read competitor content, and review new research. This constant immersion means you naturally notice trends as they emerge, often before they show up in keyword tools.

How to set this up:

Step 1: Choose 10–15 sources to monitor. These should include industry blogs, competitor newsletters, relevant subreddits, X lists, and any niche-specific publications. Use an RSS reader like Feedly to aggregate them in one place.

Step 2: Set a weekly cadence. Every week, spend 30–60 minutes reviewing what’s been published. Note any topics that appear across multiple sources.

Step 3: Document recurring themes. Keep a running list of topics you see gaining momentum. When a topic appears three or more times across different sources within a few weeks, that’s your signal to research it as a keyword.

Step 4: Validate with data. Take your theme list and check each topic against a keyword research tool or Google Trends. Confirm that the conversational buzz is translating into search behavior.

The beauty of this method is that it compounds. After a few months of consistent curation, you develop an intuition for which trends have staying power and which are just noise. That instinct is something no keyword tool can replace.

How to Find Trending Topics in AI Search

Everything above focuses on Google search trends. But search is no longer just Google.

Millions of people now ask questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot every day. The topics trending in AI search don’t always mirror what’s trending on Google — and that gap is an opportunity.

If your brand isn’t showing up when someone asks an AI assistant for recommendations in your niche, you’re missing a growing channel. SEO isn’t dying — it’s expanding. AI search is the next organic channel, and the brands that treat it as such are already seeing real traffic and conversions from it.

Here’s how to find what’s trending in AI search and make sure your content is part of the conversation.

Use Analyze AI’s Suggested Prompts to Discover Emerging Topics

Analyze AI monitors how AI engines answer questions about your industry. One of its most useful features for trend discovery is Suggested Prompts.

Based on your industry and tracked competitors, Analyze AI surfaces prompts that real users are asking AI engines — prompts where your brand might (or might not) appear in the response. These suggestions are essentially trending queries in the AI search world.

Click “Track” on any prompt that’s relevant to your business, and Analyze AI will monitor your visibility for that prompt daily across all major AI engines.

This is the AI search equivalent of finding a trending keyword in Google Trends — except instead of search volume growth, you’re looking at which prompts are generating AI responses where your competitors appear and you don’t.

Monitor Which Competitors Are Winning in AI Answers

Analyze AI’s Competitors view shows you which brands are being mentioned alongside yours in AI-generated responses — and how frequently.

When a new competitor suddenly starts appearing in AI answers across your tracked prompts, that’s a trend signal. It means their content is being cited by AI models, and you need to understand why.

Look at which pages of theirs are getting cited (Analyze AI’s Sources dashboard shows this), and create similar — or better — content to compete for those citations.

Track Your AI Traffic to Spot Page-Level Trends

Analyze AI’s AI Traffic Analytics connects to your GA4 and shows you exactly which pages are receiving traffic from AI platforms.

This data reveals which of your existing pages are already being cited and linked by AI engines. If you see a particular page suddenly gaining AI referral traffic, that’s a signal that the topic is trending in AI search — and you should double down on it.

The Landing Pages report takes this a step further, showing you page-by-page performance: which AI engines are sending traffic, how many citations each page has, engagement metrics, and conversions.

When you spot a page getting strong AI traffic with high engagement and low bounce rates, that’s a content format and topic that AI engines prefer. Create more content like it.

Use Ad Hoc Prompt Searches to Test Trending Topics

Curious whether a trending keyword you found on Google Trends or Reddit is also trending in AI search? Use Analyze AI’s Ad Hoc Prompt Search feature to check in real time.

Type a question as a user would ask it to ChatGPT or Perplexity — for example, “What are the best project management tools for remote teams?” — and Analyze AI will show you which brands appear in the AI-generated response, which sources are cited, and the overall sentiment.

This is a quick way to validate whether a trending SEO keyword also represents an opportunity in AI search.

Stay Updated With Weekly AI Visibility Reports

Trends shift fast. Analyze AI sends weekly email reports that summarize changes in your AI visibility, flag pages gaining or losing citations, highlight competitor movements, and surface new opportunities.

Think of these as your trend radar for AI search — a weekly digest that tells you what’s changing without you having to log in and check dashboards manually.

For more on tracking your brand’s presence across AI engines, see our guide on AI search monitoring tools.

How to Validate a Trending Keyword Before Creating Content

Finding a trending keyword is only half the job. Before you invest hours (or days) in creating content around it, validate that the keyword is worth pursuing. Here’s a quick checklist:

1. Confirm the trend is real and sustained

Check Google Trends for the keyword over the past 90 days. Is the interest steadily growing, or was there a single spike that’s already declining? One-day spikes (often caused by a viral news event) rarely turn into lasting search demand.

2. Check the search volume and traffic potential

Use a keyword tool to find the current monthly search volume. But don’t stop there — also check the traffic potential of the top-ranking page. Sometimes a keyword with 500 monthly searches drives 5,000 visits to the top-ranking page because that page also ranks for dozens of related terms.

You can check search volume quickly using Analyze AI’s free Keyword Difficulty Checker, which also shows you how competitive the keyword currently is.

3. Assess the competition

Look at the current SERP with a SERP Checker. Ask yourself:

• Are the top results from huge, high-authority domains?

• Is the existing content high-quality and comprehensive, or thin and basic?

• How many referring domains (backlinks) do the top-ranking pages have?

If the current results are thin, outdated, or from lower-authority sites, you have a real shot at ranking — even if the keyword is competitive on paper.

4. Verify relevance to your business

A trending keyword is only valuable if it’s relevant to your audience and business. A keyword that’s trending but has nothing to do with your product or content strategy is a distraction, not an opportunity.

Use this simple test: could you naturally mention your product, service, or expertise in an article targeting this keyword? If yes, it’s relevant. If you’d have to force it, move on.

5. Check whether AI search is also picking up the topic

As we covered above, use Analyze AI’s Ad Hoc Prompt Search to test whether the trending keyword is generating answers in AI search. If it is, that’s an additional traffic channel you can capture — making the keyword even more valuable.

Comparison: 7 Methods at a Glance

Final Thoughts

Finding trending keywords is about getting in early. When you identify a rising topic before it becomes saturated, you give yourself the best possible chance to rank, earn backlinks as the early authority, and build traffic that compounds over time.

But trends are not limited to Google anymore. AI search is growing fast, and the topics people ask about on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms don’t always overlap with what’s trending on Google. Monitoring both channels gives you a fuller picture of where demand is heading — and where to invest your content efforts.

The methods in this article aren’t mutually exclusive. The best approach is to combine several: use Google Trends for broad signals, a keyword tool for data validation, Reddit and social media for early signals, and a platform like Analyze AI to cover the AI search angle.

Start with one or two methods, build the habit, and expand from there.