# Exploding Topics

> Exploding Topics is a trend detection platform that monitors search volume, social conversation, and online mentions across millions of data points to identify topics, products, startups, and categories growing rapidly before they become obvious, presenting them as a filterable database with growth curves, channel breakdowns, forecasting, meta trends, and CSV export, with Semrush as its owner since 2024 and plans from $39 per month after a 7-day trial.

- Category: Buying Signals & Intent (https://saastracker.org/categories/intent-signals)
- Website: https://explodingtopics.com
- Starting price: $39 per month (Entrepreneur)
- Free plan: A free public browsing experience on the website shows a meaningful slice of the trends database plus a free weekly newsletter, without tracking, export, or analysis.
- Free trial: 7 days on every plan
- Founded: 2019, HQ: Remote, operating under Semrush, Ownership: Owned by Semrush, acquired in August 2024
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/exploding-topics

## Overview

Exploding Topics answers a question the rest of this category ignores: not which company is in a buying window, but which subject is about to become one. It watches search behaviour, social conversation, and mentions across the web, and surfaces topics whose growth curve is bending upward before the mainstream notices. The pitch is a claim about timing, that you see a trend twelve or more months before everyone else, and for the topics it catches early that is roughly right.

It was built as a side project by Brian Dean and Josh Howarth, grew to seven figures of revenue with a two-person team, and was acquired by Semrush in August 2024. That acquisition is the second thing Semrush bought from Brian Dean after Backlinko in 2022, and the product now also appears inside the Semrush App Center. Ownership by a large public search-data company is mostly good news for a small buyer: the dataset is not going anywhere, and the underlying search data behind it got considerably better funded.

Pricing is the friendliest in this category after the free tiers. Entrepreneur is $39 a month for 100 tracked trends and 10 trend analyses, Investor is $99 for 500 trends, 100 analyses, trending startups, forecasting, and CSV export, and Business is $249 for 2,000 trends and 500 analyses plus trend reports. Every plan carries a 7-day trial. There is a free browsing experience on the public site that shows a meaningful slice of the database without an account.

The honest limitation is that this is a market timing tool, not a prospecting tool. It will never tell you which company to email. It tells you which category to build content around, which product to stock, which feature to prioritise, or which market to enter. That is a real job and this is arguably the best cheap tool for it, but it belongs in a marketing or product plan rather than in a sales sequence.

## How it works

1. The platform continuously ingests unstructured signals across search queries, social conversation, forums, news mentions, and more recently sources like GitHub and Kickstarter, then runs pattern detection to find topics whose volume is accelerating rather than merely large. A large flat topic is not a trend; a small steep one is.

2. Detected topics are added to a database you can browse and filter by category, growth rate, absolute volume, and stage of the curve, from regular to exploding to peaked. Each topic carries a growth chart, a volume figure, related topics, and a channel breakdown showing where the conversation is actually happening.

3. You track topics you care about, which is the metered resource: 100 on the entry plan, 500 on Investor, 2,000 on Business. Tracked topics generate alerts as their trajectory changes, so a topic you flagged as interesting six months ago tells you when it enters a growth phase rather than requiring you to check.

4. Trend analyses are the second meter and cover deeper research on a specific topic. Higher plans add trending products and trending startups feeds, meta trends that group individual topics into larger movements, forecasting on where a curve is heading, CSV export, prepared trend reports, and an API for pulling trend data into your own systems.

## Best for

Content marketers and SEO teams deciding what to write about next, ecommerce operators choosing what to stock, product teams looking for underserved categories, investors screening for emerging themes, and founders trying to work out whether a market is arriving or already crowded.

## Not the right fit for

- Sales teams looking for accounts to contact. There is no company data, no contacts, and no account-level intent here at all; it is topics, not organisations.
- Anyone in a mature, slow-moving B2B category. If you sell payroll software to accountants, almost nothing in this database will change what you do next quarter.
- Buyers who need the data programmatically on the cheap plan. Export and the API sit above the $39 tier, so Entrepreneur is a browsing subscription.
- Teams who want certainty rather than a hypothesis. A rising curve is evidence that attention is growing, not that money is being spent, and plenty of trends peak without ever monetising.
- Anyone who already runs a serious search-data subscription. If you have Semrush or Ahrefs and know how to use trend and keyword growth data, much of this is a convenience layer over things you can already see.

## Features

### Trend detection

The core algorithm and what it surfaces.

- **Trends database**: A browsable, filterable set of detected topics with growth charts, volume, and stage labels, which is the product's primary surface.
- **Early detection window**: The vendor's claim is visibility twelve or more months ahead of mainstream awareness, which is achievable for topics detected in a genuinely early phase.
- **Growth stage classification**: Topics are labelled by where they sit on the curve, which matters enormously: an exploding topic is an opportunity and a peaked one is a trap.
- **Channel breakdown**: Shows where conversation about a topic is concentrated, which tells you whether to write a blog post, film a short video, or ignore it entirely.
- **Related topics**: Adjacent and derivative topics per trend, which is how a single detection becomes a content cluster or a product line.
- **Meta trends**: Groupings of individual topics into larger movements, which is the layer that turns a list of curiosities into a thesis you can present.
- **Expanded source coverage**: Beyond search and social, sources now include GitHub and Kickstarter, which surface technical and consumer product trends earlier than search does.

### Tracking and analysis

The two metered resources that define each plan.

- **Tracked trends**: 100 on Entrepreneur, 500 on Investor, 2,000 on Business. This is the main plan gate and the number to size your purchase against.
- **Trend analyses**: 10, 100, or 500 by tier. Deeper research runs on a specific topic rather than the browsing view.
- **Trend forecasting**: Projections of where a curve is heading, available from the Investor tier, which is the difference between noticing a trend and betting on one.
- **Alerts on tracked trends**: Notification when a tracked topic changes trajectory, so the database works in the background rather than requiring weekly checks.
- **Trend reports**: Prepared analytical reports on the Business tier for teams that want a finished artefact rather than raw curves.

### Specialised feeds

Cuts of the database aimed at particular jobs.

- **Trending products**: Consumer products with accelerating demand, which is the single most directly actionable feed for an ecommerce operator.
- **Trending startups**: Fast-growing companies surfaced from the same signal set, available from Investor, which is the closest this product gets to company-level data.
- **Channel-specific insight**: Views focused on where trends are emerging by platform rather than in aggregate.
- **Weekly newsletter**: A free Tuesday email of emerging topics with commentary, which is both a real information product and the top of the funnel.

### Export and integration

Getting trends out, which is where the tier gates apply.

- **CSV export**: Available from the Investor tier at $99; the $39 plan is browse-only, which is the most important thing to know before buying.
- **Trends API**: Programmatic access to trend data for teams pulling it into dashboards or their own products.
- **Semrush App Center presence**: Since the 2024 acquisition the product also appears inside Semrush's App Center, which matters if your team already lives there.

## Use cases

- **Content lead planning a quarter**: The editorial calendar is built from keyword tools that show what people already search for, which means competing with everyone who owns the same tool. Outcome: Filtering for exploding topics in the relevant category surfaces subjects with rising volume and thin existing coverage, and the team publishes before the search results page fills up.
- **Ecommerce operator choosing inventory**: Stocking decisions are made from last season's sales, which structurally guarantees arriving late to anything new. Outcome: The trending products feed identifies categories with accelerating demand months before they are obvious, and the store carries them while margin is still available.
- **Founder validating a market**: The idea feels early, but early and dead look identical from the inside and there is no way to tell which one this is. Outcome: Growth curves plus forecasting show whether interest in the problem is actually accelerating or flat, and meta trends put the idea in the context of a larger movement or reveal it has none.
- **Investor screening themes**: A small fund wants to identify categories before they become competitive, without a research team. Outcome: Meta trends and the trending startups feed produce a shortlist of themes with supporting volume data, and tracked trends alert when any of them accelerates.

## Pricing

Flat monthly subscription across three tiers, metered on tracked trends and trend analyses.

- **Entrepreneur**: $39 per month. 100 tracked trends; 10 trend analyses; Trends database and trending products; Meta trends and channel breakdown; No CSV export. The absence of export is the real constraint. This is a browse-and-decide subscription rather than a data feed.
- **Investor**: $99 per month. 500 tracked trends; 100 trend analyses; Trending startups; Trend forecasting; CSV export. Marked as best value by the vendor, and genuinely the first tier where you can take the data anywhere.
- **Business**: $249 per month. 2,000 tracked trends; 500 trend analyses; Trend reports; Everything in Investor. Aimed at agencies and research teams tracking many categories at once rather than one business.

Billing notes:

- Prices are published monthly as of August 2026; the pricing page lists monthly rates only rather than advertising a separate annual discount.
- Every plan includes a 7-day free trial, which is short but adequate to check whether your category has anything happening in it.
- CSV export begins at the $99 Investor tier. Buying Entrepreneur at $39 expecting to pull the data out is the most common mistake here.
- The metered resources are tracked trends and trend analyses, not seats or queries, so a small team can share a plan without the bill changing.
- The public site and the free weekly newsletter expose enough of the database to sanity-check the product before any trial, which is worth doing first.

Value assessment: Model it by outcome rather than by record, because there is no per-record unit here. At $39 a month, Entrepreneur costs about $470 a year and needs to change one content or inventory decision to pay for itself, which is a low bar for anyone in a fast-moving consumer or technology category. At $99, Investor adds forecasting and export and is the right plan for anyone whose output is a spreadsheet or a report rather than a decision in their own head. At $249, Business is agency pricing and only makes sense across many clients or categories. The value question is not really the price, it is whether your market moves fast enough to have trends worth catching, and for a large slice of B2B the honest answer is no.

## Strengths

- Genuinely early detection on fast-moving consumer and technology categories, which is a materially different output from keyword tools that report what is already large.
- Growth stage labelling is the underrated feature: knowing a topic has already peaked saves more money than knowing one is rising.
- Meta trends turn a scatter of individual topics into a thesis, which is what makes the output presentable to a board or a client.
- Cheap by any standard in this category, starting at $39 with a 7-day trial and a substantial free browsing experience.
- Channel breakdown tells you where to act, not just what to act on, which is the step most trend tools skip.
- Semrush ownership since August 2024 removes the small-vendor continuity risk that applies to most tools in this space.
- The free weekly newsletter is a real product in itself and lets you evaluate the quality of detection over months without paying anything.

## Limitations

- No company or contact data of any kind, so it cannot feed a sales motion directly and does not belong in an outbound stack.
- CSV export starts at $99, making the $39 headline price misleading for anyone who intended to use the data outside the interface.
- Attention is not demand. A trend can grow enormously in search and conversation while nobody spends money, and the platform cannot distinguish the two.
- Coverage skews toward consumer, ecommerce, and technology topics; slow-moving professional and industrial B2B categories generate few useful detections.
- Trend detection produces false positives by construction: a small base makes any absolute increase look explosive, and short-lived novelty registers identically to a durable shift.
- Forecasting is a projection of a curve, not a model of a market, and should be read as a shape rather than a number.
- Overlap with Semrush and other search-data tools is real, and teams already paying for one may find the incremental insight thinner than expected.

## Comparisons

- **Exploding Topics vs SparkToro**: SparkToro answers where a specific audience already pays attention, listing the sites, podcasts, channels, and communities they use, from $50 a month with a free tier. Exploding Topics answers what is growing right now regardless of audience, from $39. SparkToro is for planning distribution to people you have defined; Exploding Topics is for finding subjects before your competitors do. They pair well and neither replaces the other.
- **Exploding Topics vs Visualping**: Visualping tells you when a page you nominated changed, from $14 a month, which is a precise signal about specific companies. Exploding Topics tells you when a subject is accelerating across the whole web, which is a broad signal about markets. If your question is what is my competitor doing, use Visualping; if it is what should we be doing, use Exploding Topics.
- **Exploding Topics vs Owler**: Owler monitors named companies and emails you when they do something, at $39 a month with a free tier. Exploding Topics monitors subjects and shows you what is growing, at the same price. They are the two halves of cheap market awareness for a small business: Owler covers the accounts and competitors you already know, Exploding Topics covers the things you do not yet know to look for.
- **Exploding Topics vs Trigify**: Trigify listens to public social activity for person-level buying signals and routes them into a sequencer from $40 a month. Exploding Topics aggregates the same kind of public attention into topic-level trends and never names a person. Trigify is a sales tool; Exploding Topics is a marketing and product tool. A team that buys Exploding Topics expecting leads has bought the wrong thing.
- **Exploding Topics vs Apollo.io**: Apollo is a contact database and sequencer, the operational end of go-to-market, and it has nothing to say about which market to be in. Exploding Topics is the opposite. There is no overlap and no substitution; the only reason to compare them is to be clear that Exploding Topics sits upstream of everything Apollo does and will not generate a single lead.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Fifteen minutes. Sign up, filter the database to your categories, track the topics that look relevant, and the alerts do the rest. There is nothing to configure and nothing to connect.
- Learning curve: Low mechanically, moderate interpretively. Reading the interface is trivial; distinguishing a durable shift from a novelty spike, and resisting the pull of an impressive-looking curve on a tiny base, is the actual skill and it takes a few months of watching to develop.
- Onboarding: Fully self-serve on all three tiers with a 7-day trial and no sales contact. The free public site and newsletter let you evaluate detection quality before the trial clock starts.
- Migration: Nothing to migrate in. On exit, CSV exports from the Investor tier and above are yours; tracked topic lists do not port. Because the value is in decisions you already made rather than in an accumulated dataset, cancelling costs less here than with most subscriptions in this category.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web application, Trends API, Semrush App Center, Email newsletter, CSV export from the Investor tier
- API: A trends API is offered for pulling trend data into external dashboards and products, sitting above the entry tier alongside CSV export.
- Compliance: No personal data in the core dataset, which are aggregated topic volumes, Operated under Semrush ownership since 2024
- Data residency: Not published.
- SSO: Not advertised on the published self-serve tiers.
- Security notes: The dataset consists of aggregated search and mention volumes rather than records about people or companies, so privacy exposure is minimal compared with every other product in this category. Ownership by a large public company brings a more formal security programme behind the product than its two-founder origins would suggest.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, In-app help
- Documentation: Documentation covering the trends database, tracking, meta trends, forecasting, and the API, alongside a substantial library of published trend research.
- Community: A large free weekly newsletter audience and a widely cited public research blog; no formal user forum.

## Company

- Founded: 2019
- Founders: Brian Dean, Josh Howarth
- Headquarters: Remote, operating under Semrush
- Ownership: Owned by Semrush, acquired in August 2024
- Employees: Not disclosed separately since the acquisition; originally built by a two-person team
- Funding: Bootstrapped to seven-figure annual revenue as a two-person business before being acquired by Semrush in August 2024 for an undisclosed amount.

Funding history:

- Acquisition (2024): Undisclosed. Acquired by Semrush in August, the company's second purchase from Brian Dean after Backlinko in 2022.

Timeline:

- 2019: Brian Dean and Josh Howarth start Exploding Topics as a side project, using data aggregation and machine learning to spot trends before they become obvious.
- 2021: The paid Pro product launches, turning a free trend newsletter into a subscription database with tracking and analysis.
- 2023: The business reaches seven-figure annual revenue with a two-person team and a customer list including large consumer and technology brands.
- 2024: Semrush acquires Exploding Topics in August for an undisclosed amount, its second acquisition from Brian Dean after Backlinko.
- 2025: The product appears inside the Semrush App Center, and source coverage expands to include GitHub and Kickstarter alongside search and social.
- 2026: Plans stand at $39, $99, and $249 a month, metered on tracked trends and analyses, with forecasting and CSV export from the middle tier.

## Integrations

Semrush App Center, Trends API, CSV export from the Investor tier, Email alerts on tracked trends, Weekly newsletter

## FAQ

### What is Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a trend detection platform. It monitors search volume, social conversation, and mentions across millions of data points and surfaces topics, products, startups, and categories whose growth is accelerating, before they become widely known. You browse the database, track the topics you care about, and get alerted when their trajectory changes.

### How much does Exploding Topics cost?

Entrepreneur is $39 a month for 100 tracked trends and 10 trend analyses. Investor is $99 for 500 trends, 100 analyses, trending startups, forecasting, and CSV export. Business is $249 for 2,000 trends, 500 analyses, and trend reports. Every plan has a 7-day free trial, and the public website plus a free weekly newsletter give substantial access without an account.

### Which signal does Exploding Topics own?

Search and topic trends. It aggregates attention across search queries, social conversation, forums, news mentions, and sources like GitHub and Kickstarter into topic-level growth curves. It carries no company records, no contacts, no funding data, no technographics, and no website visitor identification. The unit of analysis is a subject, not an organisation.

### How fresh is the data and how stale can a trend get?

Detection is continuous and curves update regularly, so a topic's current position on its growth arc is current. The staleness risk is different here: a topic detected two years ago may still sit in your tracked list looking interesting when it has already peaked and declined. The growth stage labelling is what protects you, and it is the field to read first on any topic you did not just discover.

### How often does it flag something that turns out to be nothing?

Regularly, and the mechanism is worth understanding. Growth is measured proportionally, so a topic going from 200 to 2,000 monthly searches shows the same explosive curve as one going from 20,000 to 200,000, and the first may be a passing novelty with no commercial substance. Short-lived viral moments register identically to durable shifts. The defences are to check absolute volume alongside growth rate, to look at whether related topics are also rising, and to give anything you are betting real money on a few months of observation before acting.

### Could I get this signal free from a public source?

Partially, and more than for most tools here. Free public search trend tools will show you the curve for any term you already thought of, at no cost. The gap is discovery: you cannot ask a public trends tool what is growing that I have not heard of, because it only answers questions you already know to ask. That inversion is the entire product, and it is what the $39 buys. The free Exploding Topics newsletter also gives away a weekly sample of exactly that discovery, so evaluate it for a couple of months before paying.

### Is the output a dashboard or an actual routed task?

A dashboard, plus email alerts on topics you track. Nothing is routed, scored, or assigned. The intended output is a decision by a human: what to write, what to stock, what to build, what to fund. That is a legitimate design for this job, but it means Exploding Topics never produces work in someone's queue the way a sales signal tool does.

### Are exports limited, and does the API cost extra?

CSV export is not available at all on the $39 Entrepreneur plan; it starts at $99 with Investor. That single gate is the most important pricing detail in the product. A trends API exists for programmatic access, sitting above the entry tier. If your plan involves pulling trend data into your own dashboards, budget for Investor at minimum.

### Does a trend here mean people will actually buy something?

No, and this is the caveat to hold onto. What the platform measures is attention: searches, mentions, conversations. Attention and spending correlate loosely and lag unpredictably. Plenty of topics accelerate enormously in search while nobody builds a business on them. Use a rising curve as a reason to investigate a market, never as evidence that a market exists.

### Who owns Exploding Topics?

Semrush, which acquired it in August 2024 for an undisclosed sum. It was founded in 2019 by Brian Dean and Josh Howarth and grown to seven-figure revenue by a two-person team before the sale. It was Semrush's second acquisition from Brian Dean after Backlinko in 2022, and the product now also appears inside the Semrush App Center.

## Editorial verdict

Exploding Topics is the cheapest useful answer to a question no other tool in this category addresses: what is about to matter. For $39 a month it will reliably surface subjects in fast-moving consumer and technology categories months before they show up in a keyword tool, and the growth stage labelling stops you from chasing things that already peaked. Buy Investor at $99 rather than Entrepreneur if you intend to use the data anywhere outside the interface, because export starts there. Read the free newsletter for two months first, since it exposes the actual quality of the detection at no cost, and be honest about your market: if you sell into a slow, mature B2B category, this database will have very little to say to you. And do not confuse it with a sales tool, because it will never hand you a single account to contact.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology