How do you find trending YouTube Shorts now that the Trending page is gone?

Q: How much quota does a trend search use?

By default a project gets 100 search.list calls a day, each page of results counting as one call, and 10,000 units a day for most other methods, where videos.list, channels.list and playlistItems.list cost 1 unit each. Quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time.

Short answer

YouTube announced on 10 July 2025 that it was removing the Trending page and the Trending Now list; no public list of trending Shorts replaced them. For Shorts, YouTube points to the Trends page in the mobile app (Shorts, then Trending), the Trending list of sounds in the Shorts camera, and, for creators, the Trends tab under Analytics in YouTube Studio. To find Shorts that took off in a niche, compare each one’s views with the median views of its channel’s recent Shorts.

Written by the Mellow team · Updated November 8, 2026, sources read November 8, 2026

What happened to the Trending page

TeamYouTube announced on 10 July 2025 that it would remove the Trending page and the Trending Now list within a couple of weeks. The reason it gave: visits to the page had decreased significantly over the last five years, as people found trends through recommendations, search suggestions, Shorts and comments. In their place came category charts: Trending Music Videos, Weekly Top Podcast Shows and Trending Movie Trailers, with the Gaming Explore page for gaming. For browsing that is not personalised, the post points to the Explore menu, creator channels and the subscriptions feed.

The Data API changed with it. Its revision history says that from 21 July 2025 the mostPopular chart of videos.list returns videos from the Trending Music, Movies and Gaming charts instead of the Trending Now list, “in tandem with the deprecation of YouTube’s Trending page”. A script that used chart=mostPopular as a trending feed now gets those three categories only.

The Help Center’s Trending Charts page, read today, says the charts are updated roughly every 30 minutes and show the same videos to everyone in a country. Among the signals it lists are view count, how quickly views are growing, the video’s age, and “how the video performs compared to other recent uploads from the same channel”. The page does not mention Shorts.

Where Shorts trends show up now

Read on 8 November 2026. None of these is a list of every trending Short.

Surface	Where	What it shows	What it does not show
Shorts Trends page	Mobile app: Shorts, then Trending (Creators page)	“Shorts ranked by popularity on the platform”, as inspiration (Help Center)	A niche or country filter, view counts compared, an export. The pages give no ranking rules.
Trending sounds	Shorts camera, Add sound, the Trending list (YouTube Blog)	Audio that is trending now, in a list the blog calls curated	Which Shorts did well with a sound. The Help Center says using Audio Library sounds can help a Short appear on sound pages.
Hashtag pages	Search a niche hashtag and tap it (YouTube Blog)	A page of Shorts for that tag, where the blog says you can see what is popular in a niche	How each Short did against its channel
Trends tab in YouTube Studio	Studio, Analytics, Trends (Help Center)	Top searches and recent videos from your audience’s last 28 days, Breakout videos from creators similar to you, Content gaps for Shorts, and audience interest from very low to very high	Other channels’ numbers. Some insights are limited to certain countries, languages and devices, and a section may not appear. A redesign has been rolling out since July 2026.
Inspiration tab in Studio	Studio, Content, Get Inspired, desktop only (Help Center)	AI-suggested ideas from your channel’s data, in English only	It is being deprecated gradually from August 2026; the page sends you to Ask Studio instead
YouTube Charts	Explore menu, then Charts (Help Center)	Category charts: music videos, podcasts, movie trailers	Shorts as a category

What changed since the Trending page went: the 10 July 2025 post said the Inspiration tab “will keep giving creators personalized ideas”. Its own Help Center page now says that from August 2026 it is being deprecated.

How to spot a Short that took off in a niche

YouTube publishes no niche list, so the method here is ours. Many views on a large channel may be ordinary for it; what stands out is a Short that did far better than its own channel usually does. Divide its views by the median views of the channel’s recent Shorts. The median is the middle value, so one earlier hit barely moves it.

An example with invented round numbers:

	Channel A	Channel B
Median views of its last 20 Shorts	5,000	400,000
Views on the Short in question	60,000	600,000
Views ÷ median	12	1.5

Channel B’s Short has ten times the views, yet Channel A’s is the outlier, and the one worth studying for a hook, a format or a sound. Three cautions:

Compare like with like in age. A Short posted yesterday has had less time than its channel’s older ones. Compare Shorts from the same window.
A short history says little. A median of three Shorts is noise.
Compare Shorts with Shorts. Since 31 March 2025 a Shorts view counts every start or replay, with no minimum watch time; long videos moved to counting from the first frame on 24 August 2026 (revision history, videos resource).

For what to make once you have found it, see YouTube Shorts ideas; for your own channel’s numbers, how to see YouTube analytics.

Doing it with the YouTube Data API

An agent or a script can run the same comparison. The calls, with their default quota as Google’s pages state it today:

Call	What it returns	Default quota
`search.list` with `type=video`, `videoDuration=short`, `order=viewCount`, `publishedAfter`, `q`, `regionCode`, `relevanceLanguage` and `maxResults` up to 50	Candidate videos and their channels	1 call each, from a bucket of its own: 100 `search.list` calls a day per project
`videos.list` with `part=statistics,contentDetails` and the video IDs	`viewCount` and `duration`	1 unit, from the 10,000 units a day shared by other methods
`channels.list` with `part=contentDetails`	The channel’s uploads playlist	1 unit
`playlistItems.list` on that playlist, up to 50 items a page	The channel’s recent uploads, for the median	1 unit a page

The quota calculator gives these costs, says every further page of results is charged again, and that daily quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time. Search got its own bucket on 1 June 2026, and on 3 June 2026 the API added videos.batchGetStats, also with a bucket of its own of 10,000 units a day (revision history). Two things the reference pages say that change the results:

videoDuration=short means under four minutes, longer than a Short can be (Shorts length). The videos resource we read has no field that marks a Short, so horizontal videos under four minutes come back too.
Sorting by views can thin the list. search.list warns that an order other than relevance may return a smaller or incomplete set, especially with publishedAfter.

Policy, in two lines: the Developer Policies (III.E.4.h) say an API client must not use API Data to create new or derived metrics, and since June 2026 an addendum allows custom channel scores and ratios for developers who accept it through the quota extension form under an Analytics & Reporting use case. Public data fetched without a user’s sign-in may be stored for at most 30 calendar days before it is deleted or refreshed (III.E.4.d).

Where Mellow Hub fits

Since 8 November 2026, Mellow Hub’s Trends searches Shorts by topic, language and period through the YouTube Data API, free of credits. On YouTube it shows each Short’s own public figures (views, likes, comments, date) and no ×N: YouTube’s developer policies ask for its approval before a product shows figures worked out from its data, and Mellow has asked for it. Hub’s other part comes after: once you or your AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT and others, through Hub’s MCP server or its REST API) have made the Short, Hub checks it against YouTube’s rules before anything is sent, a required title of up to 100 characters, a description of up to 5,000 and exactly one video, then publishes it or schedules it to YouTube and the other networks you have connected. The YouTube MCP guide has the setup, and scheduling Shorts the timing.

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.

Questions people also ask

Is the YouTube Trending page coming back?

Nothing we read says so. TeamYouTube’s post of 10 July 2025 describes a shift from one Trending list to category charts that YouTube will add to over time, and the Help Center’s current page is about Trending Charts.

Why don’t I see the Trends tab in YouTube Studio?

The Help Center says some of its insights are limited to certain countries, languages and devices, and that a section may not appear when there are no relevant videos. It also says an updated Studio has been rolling out since July 2026, so the tab may look different. The page names no other eligibility rule.

Can the YouTube API tell me which videos are Shorts?

Not directly, in the pages we read. The videos resource has no Shorts field. You can filter with videoDuration=short, which means under four minutes, and read contentDetails.duration, but a horizontal video under four minutes passes both.

Does chart=mostPopular still return trending videos?

Not in the old sense. Since 21 July 2025 the revision history says the mostPopular chart returns videos from the Trending Music, Movies and Gaming charts instead of the Trending Now list.

How much quota does a trend search use?

By default a project gets 100 search.list calls a day, each page of results counting as one call, and 10,000 units a day for most other methods, where videos.list, channels.list and playlistItems.list cost 1 unit each. Quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time.

Sources

Other companies’ features change. Every statement about them rests on these pages, as they read on the date above.