Topic demand validation

Build an evidence brief about what people search for, what is changing, what already ranks, and what a bounded public discussion sample says. Keep those signals separate: they answer different questions and do not establish sales, market size, or future growth.

Scope and inputs

Ask for or infer the topic, product/content decision, target market and language, time window, and any excluded sources. If geography or period is unspecified, state the chosen defaults before collecting. Keep the scope narrow enough to compare consistently.

Use this workflow for category, problem, audience, or content-topic discovery. For one query’s autocomplete or SERP, use the focused SERP workflow. For a named brand’s mentions and reputation, use brand-mention-research.

Collect comparable evidence

• Expand one or a few seed phrases with Google Suggest. Save the exact prefix, country, language, returned completions, and collection time. Suggestions reveal query phrasing; they are not search-volume estimates.
• Compare no more than five selected terms in one Google Trends request. Keep geography, range, category, search type, and locale consistent. Use rising queries or related topics to discover candidates, then compare those candidates in a shared request. If a term has zero or missing data, preserve that status; do not treat it as zero demand.
• Inspect a bounded SERP sample with Bing and/or Brave for the highest-value query clusters. Record each exact query, country/language, rank, title, URL, and result type. Search results show what surfaced for that query at collection time, not the size of the market.
• Sample one or more relevant social sources—Reddit, TikTok, or YouTube—using focused queries. Record the query, filters, time, pagination, result IDs, dates, and how many sampled results are actually relevant. Reddit's time filter applies to top/comments sorts; do not claim that new plus a time value enforces a date window. TikTok search has no date filter here: filter returned dates locally and mark unknown dates. YouTube offers upload-date filters, but results remain a selected sample. Search feeds may be noisy or incomplete; narrow a query or community when needed, and stop when the sample cannot support the question.
• Open only selected relevant posts/videos for context. Read comments or captions/transcripts when they materially clarify the expressed need. Deduplicate within each platform and distinguish top-level posts from comments. Do not turn sampled posts, views, or comment counts into unique audience reach.

Use a modest first pass when the user has not set a budget: one Trends comparison of up to five terms, a small set of autocomplete prefixes, one or two SERP queries per important cluster, and a bounded first page of social results. Expand only when the initial evidence is relevant and the decision needs it. Successful API calls are billable; agree a wider collection budget with the user before multiplying searches or paging deeply.