Methodology

What "trending" means here

A trend is a topic receiving a meaningful, verifiable spike in public attention — not simply a topic we find interesting. Every published trend states its status (Exploding, Rising, Stable, or Falling) based on how quickly attention is changing.

Current V1 methodology

Today, scores and velocity are entered editorially by our team based on available public signals, and every score is stamped with a scoring-model version. This is a manual, transparent process — not an automated one — and any trend built from illustrative data is clearly labeled.

Future automated scoring

A future version will combine search growth, search volume, velocity, news coverage, social attention, geographic spread, and persistence into a weighted score, and later a learned model. When that ships, it will carry a new scoring-model version so historical scores remain comparable rather than silently changing.

Sources

Every published trend requires at least one named, credible source — government bodies, official organizations, company releases, sports organizations, scientific institutions, established newsrooms, or public datasets. We link to sources directly; we do not reproduce their reporting as our own.

Editorial review

Every trend moves through Detected → Review Required → Verified → Published before it is public, and can be Updated or Archived afterward. A trend missing a title, category, required explanation, or source cannot be published — this is enforced in software, not left to editorial memory.

How we use AI

AI may help draft an explanation from sources we've already verified. It is never treated as a source itself, cannot publish content, and every AI-assisted paragraph is marked as such until a human editor reviews it.

Limitations

TrendsBeacon does not claim to be exhaustive or perfectly real-time. Coverage depends on available public signals and editorial capacity, and will expand as our data pipeline grows.

Corrections

If you believe a trend is inaccurate or a source is misattributed, contact us and we will review and correct it, noting the update time on the affected page.