What to make a video aboutTrending topics in Australia today

Two free, official sources. The searches are Google Trends' public "trending now" feed for Australia (geo AU): the search, Google's approximate volume, and the news stories Google attached to it. The reading list is Wikimedia's public pageview figures for English Wikipedia, the most-read articles over one whole UTC day. The Wikipedia list is worldwide, not Australia only, so it is the same on every country page.

It is Google's own band, not a count. Google Trends reports search volume in coarse steps — 2,000+, 20,000+, 50,000+ and so on — so a search marked 50,000+ has had at least fifty thousand searches in the period Google measures, and we have no finer figure than that.

Because some of what trends on any day is a death, a disaster or a crime. We list those — leaving them out would misstate what people are actually searching for and reading — but we do not prompt anyone to make a video on someone's tragedy. The check is a plain word list over the topic and its headlines, so it will sometimes hold back a harmless topic too.

Because a language model's knowledge of this week is stale and the story is not. When Google attaches a news story to a search, the button sends that story's link to our URL-to-video tool, which reads the article and writes the script from it. A topic with no story — every Wikipedia one — goes in as an idea for a short explainer instead. Making the video needs a plan, from $7 a month.

The page is rebuilt from both sources at most once an hour. Google's feed moves through the day, so the searches can change between visits. The Wikipedia list is a finished day — usually yesterday, or the day before early in the UTC morning, before Wikimedia publishes yesterday's figures — so it changes once a day.

No. It is Google searches and Wikipedia reading, nothing else. We have no TikTok or Instagram data, and a page implying otherwise would be lying about where the list came from.