Methodology: how our lists work

This page explains how the numbers and lists on the site are produced, including the limits of the data.

Sources

• Google Trends daily trending searches. Each country's list is fetched hourly for our main countries and every few hours for the others. Google publishes at most ten topics per country at a time, together with a traffic bucket (for example "2,000+ searches") and the time each topic began trending.
• Wikipedia's most-read pages for each country. Wikipedia publishes this once a day with a delay of about a day, so it is shown as "Most read on Wikipedia yesterday", not as a live list.

How a rank is decided

Google's own feed is ordered by when each topic started, not by popularity. We therefore rank the topics in a country by their search-volume bucket, largest first, and by how recently they started when two topics are in the same bucket. Buckets are broad, so ties are common and small movements in rank are normal. The worldwide list ranks a topic by how many countries it is trending in.

Graphs and "earlier today"

We save a record each time a topic enters a list, changes rank or leaves it. The graph for a topic shows its rank over the last 24 hours (a higher line means a better rank). A topic with fewer than three data points is marked "New". The "earlier today" columns show what the list looked like in previous hours.

Categories

Each topic is given one category, once. We use known names and keyword rules first, then Wikipedia's own categories for Wikipedia topics, and an AI model for the rest. We keep a confidence value for each decision, and uncertain ones are reviewed by a person. See the AI disclosure.

Sensitive topics

Topics that are about a death, an injury, a crime, a missing person, a disaster, a health emergency, a person under 18 or a private individual are listed by name only: no category, statistics or graph. Topics we have not finished checking are treated the same way until they are cleared.

Which pages exist

A category page for a country exists only when that category has at least five cleared topics in that country over the last seven days. Otherwise the page does not exist and is not linked. Daily archive pages exist for finished days and never change.

Limits

We only see what these sources publish. A topic missing from a list may still be popular, search volume is shown in broad buckets, and the same story can appear as separate topics when it is written differently or in another language.