How do you find trends on TikTok?

Where TikTok shows trends, side by side

Read and opened on 8 November 2026. The Creative Center rows are what its pages showed us that day, signed out. The other rows come from TikTok’s Creator Academy and Help Center.

The Creator tab of the Creative Center read “Coming soon”.

The Creative Center is built for ads

TikTok’s About Creative Center page calls it a free, public home of resources for creating effective TikTok ads. A login is not required, but TikTok recommends one to see all of its features, data and insights. The How to use Trends article gives four steps:

1. Log in to Creative Center.
2. Click Trends.
3. Search or filter by industry or time frame.
4. Click See Analytics on any hashtag for its trendline, related videos, audience insights, regional popularity and related hashtags.

The industries are TikTok’s own list, such as Beauty & Personal Care, Pets or Games.

What changed: both help articles now describe Trends as hashtags only. The old address of the Creative Center’s songs page opened the Trends page instead, and the help article “About Trends” no longer loads. If a guide sends you there for trending songs, the list is no longer on the page.

TikTok Studio: Inspiration and Trending Topics

The Creator Academy gives these steps in the TikTok app:

1. Navigate to your profile.
2. Tap the menu icon.
3. Select TikTok Studio.
4. Scroll down to Inspiration and click View all.
5. Tap the Posts, Topics or Creators tabs.

The Trending tab shows top trending posts, topics and creators, filtered by topic and location. Recommended shows posts similar to yours, what your followers viewed and searched for, and similar creators. On the web, Inspiration is under Tools in TikTok Studio. The separate TikTok Studio app has four tabs of its own: Hot, Similar, Followers viewed and Outliers.

Trending Topics opens on any topic to a trend graph, which shows whether its popularity is rising or falling, and top-performing videos. TikTok says it is working on access beyond the seven countries.

Discover, search and the Sounds page

TikTok’s Help Center gives two steps for Discover:

1. In the TikTok app, tap Discover at the bottom.
2. Use the search bar at the top to find content or explore trending videos, hashtags, creators and sponsored content.

Some people see a Friends tab in place of Discover. In search, the most relevant results are in the Top tab, and More options, then Filters, sorts them.

For sounds, the Help Center’s Sounds page says to tap Add post, then Add sound, and choose from the For You, Favourites or Recent tab, or search. The Creator Academy says the same page holds trending hits. A Business account cannot use music that is not licensed for commercial use.

What none of them shows

• Why something trends. The hashtag list gives no ranking rule. Trending Topics orders by video views and the Video tab by views or engagement, and neither says how a topic or a video gets onto the list.
• An export. None of the pages we read mentions one.
• Your niche, exactly. Every filter is TikTok’s own category list.
• Data through an API. TikTok’s Research Tools serve qualified researchers, who must be “independent of commercial interests” and work on a non-commercial basis.

Finding videos that took off in your niche

TikTok Studio’s Outliers tab finds videos “with views that significantly exceed a creator’s average level”. The same check works by hand for any creator in your niche:

1. List five to ten accounts in your niche.
2. Write down the views of each one’s recent videos, ten or so.
3. Take the median: sort the numbers and pick the middle one. One hit pulls an average up; it barely moves a median.
4. Divide each video’s views by that creator’s median.
5. Look at the videos with the highest ratio, and at what they share: topic, opening, sound, format.

TikTok gives no number for “significantly”. Pick a cut of your own, such as 3 times the median, and keep it the same for every account. Compare videos of similar age, since a new video has had less time.

An example, with invented round numbers:

A list sorted by views puts B’s 400k video first. The ratio says A’s video did far better against A’s usual, so it is the one to study. The average of A’s videos is about 18.9k, which would put the same video at 4.8×.

Mellow Hub’s part

Since 8 November 2026, Mellow Hub’s Trends shows TikToks that took off in a topic, or in TikTok’s own trending feed: each with its ×N against its creator’s usual views, read from public pages through a data provider, and a breakdown that writes your own version. A new TikTok search costs 2 AI credits. It has no list of trending sounds. The rest of Hub’s part starts when your video exists. You, or your AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT and others, through Hub’s MCP server or REST API), send it. Hub checks it against TikTok’s rules first: a caption up to 2,200 characters, and one video or up to 35 images as a photo post. Then it publishes or schedules the post to TikTok and the other connected networks.

Hub uploads the file as it is and cannot name a particular sound from TikTok’s library. To use a trending sound, send the video as a draft: it lands in your TikTok inbox, and you add the sound in TikTok’s editor. TikTok reviews each video before others see it, so a TikTok sent through Hub reads as sent rather than live. The setup is in the TikTok MCP guide.

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.