Can ChatGPT find trending Reels?

What ChatGPT does on its own

OpenAI’s help page on web search, read on 10 November 2026, says:

• Web search is available on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu, and to people who are not signed in, on chatgpt.com and in the desktop and mobile apps, within each plan’s usage limits.
• ChatGPT may search on its own when a question would benefit from current information. To ask for it, open View all tools and choose Search, or type / in the message box and choose Search.
• Answers that use search may include citations, and the Sources button lists the cited pages and other relevant links.
• ChatGPT sometimes sends a rewritten version of your question to partner search providers.
• Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or wrong, and OpenAI suggests opening a source to check it and its date.

So ChatGPT can find articles, news and roundups that write about Reels trends, each as current as the day it was written. That is a search of the web. It is not a feed of the Reels Instagram itself ranks as trending.

Where Instagram keeps its trending reels

• In its apps. The Help Center describes a trending tab at the bottom of the Edits app: reels from public accounts that are trending on Instagram, suggested by how popular they may be, how people interact with them, and when or where they were shared, each with its views, likes and shares. That is a screen in an app, not a page a search engine indexes. Instagram’s other places, from the Reels tab to the Professional dashboard, are in How do you find trending reels on Instagram?
• In Meta’s API, one hashtag at a time. Meta’s Hashtag Search reference finds public media tagged with a hashtag, including its most popular and its most recent posts. It allows 30 unique hashtags per Instagram Business or Creator account in a rolling 7 days, and fetching a hashtag’s media counts as a query. Using it needs App Review for the Instagram Public Content Access feature and the instagram_basic permission. The reference describes no list of trending Reels across Instagram.

So the list most creators want, other people’s Reels ranked by how far they beat their creator’s usual views, does not come out of a web search or out of Meta’s API. It takes reading Instagram’s public pages and doing the arithmetic, which is what trend tools do; the method is in What is an outlier video?, and the tools that publish an MCP server are compared in this answer.

What ChatGPT can do with Mellow Hub connected

Mellow Hub added two trend tools to its MCP server on 8 November 2026. trends_search looks for videos on one network per call:

• query: what the videos are about, 2 to 120 characters, written in any language. A category, one of Hub’s ready-made topic or format feeds, can stand in for it.
• platform: set it to instagram for Reels. Without it the search runs on YouTube; tiktok is the third choice.
• language: the language the Reels should be in, as a code (en, ru, es, de, fr, pt, it, tr, ar, he). Omit it to take Reels in any language.
• days: how far back to look, 3, 7, 30 or 90 days. Omitted, it is 30.

trends_breakdown takes video, the Reel’s link or the id trends_search gave it, plus niche (your profile’s subject; Hub falls back to the one saved in Trends) and language (English unless you name another).

Asked for “Reels about meal prep that took off this month”, ChatGPT would send {"query": "meal prep", "platform": "instagram", "days": 30}. For every Reel the answer holds a link, the caption, the counts of views, likes and comments, the publication date, the account and its follower count, typicalViews (that account’s median views on its other recent videos) and multiplier.

How Hub gets those numbers, and the price of each call:

• Reels and TikToks. Hub reads them from public pages through a data provider and divides each video’s views by the median of its creator’s: that ratio is the ×N. Instagram does not always report a Reel’s views or date, and a Reel missing either is dropped. A video counts as taken off from ×2 upward, with 5,000 views or more.
• YouTube Shorts. Free to search, and limited to the counts YouTube publishes (views, likes, comments, date). There is no ×N on YouTube until YouTube approves Mellow working out figures from its data, which Mellow has applied for.
• Credits. Each fresh Instagram or TikTok search takes 2 AI credits from your Hub balance. Repeat a query someone ran a short while ago and it is free; when a search comes back empty, the credits are refunded.
• Breakdowns. 2 AI credits each. You get the reasons the Reel worked and a version for you: a hook, three alternative hooks, three to five steps and a caption. The model works from the caption, the numbers and a transcript of the speech; nobody watches the Reel.

A ChatGPT connection is shown both tools, and Hub’s consent screen lists the AI-credits permission with its box unticked. Without it, a trends_breakdown call is turned down with instructions for granting it.

Publishing is outside both tools. Only create_post sends a post, and only to the accounts, mode (review or autopilot), daily ceiling and expiry you approved. The full feature is described in the launch post.

Adding the connector, and which plans can

OpenAI’s page on custom MCP servers, read on 10 November 2026, says:

Custom MCP servers cannot be connected on mobile: web only. Deep research can use custom apps for read and fetch actions, not write actions. To add one, go to Plugins, choose the plus button, then Add custom MCP server, and enter a name and the server’s HTTPS URL. Then set up its authentication, tick the risk acknowledgement and choose Create as a plugin. In a chat, type @ and choose it; the choice applies to that message.

Hub marks trends_search as read-only and trends_breakdown as not, since it spends credits and saves the idea in Hub. We have not tested a Pro connection, so we cannot say whether ChatGPT lets one call trends_search.

Hub’s URL and its consent screen are in the ChatGPT guide. OpenAI renames these menus from time to time; its own page has the current labels. If your plan cannot add a server, Claude takes custom connectors on its Free plan too, one of them: see Can Claude find TikTok trends?

Hub has no free plan: a new account starts with a 7-day free trial of a monthly plan. Starting it takes a card, and $0 is charged that day; cancel before the 7 days end and nothing is charged. After the trial the plan renews monthly, from $19 a month (Solo), and the first paid month is 20% off. A yearly plan is charged on the day you choose it, with no free trial. Publishing is unlimited on every plan, under a fair-use ceiling that stops automated floods (900 publications a month on Solo), where one publication is one post on one account, so a post sent to five networks counts as five toward it. There are no automatic overage charges.

What we have and have not verified

On 8 November 2026, Hub’s production tool list carried both trend tools, and a search on each network returned videos; on Instagram, four Reels. We have not recorded a trends_search run from inside ChatGPT.