Popwire
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ALTERNATIVESSOURCES READ 2026-09-19

Where else you find out what everyone is watching

Five ways to answer it, on the same six criteria, with the page every cell was read off and the day it was read. Three of the five do something this wire does not, and those rows say so.

The short answer

The word popular means four different things on this grid and that is what decides the answer. Google Trends counts searches, which is the widest sample of attention anybody publishes and tells you nothing about who wrote about it. BuzzSumo counts engagement on published content and sells the archive, the alerts and the export that go with doing this for work. Exploding Topics sells the opposite of current, a topic on the way up twelve months early, and is the only entry with no free reading tier. Ground News clusters a story from the outlets covering it and then rates those outlets for bias and factuality using three third party monitors, which is more than this wire does. Popwire answers one narrower question: what is being reported right now, and by whom, with the outlet and its own headline on every item and a free page for each one. If you need a number, read Google Trends. If you need it for work, buy BuzzSumo. If you need the political shape of the coverage, read Ground News. If you want to see what was filed today and go and read the outlets that filed it, this wire is the one that hands you that.

The six criteria below are identical for every entry and Popwire is the first row of all six, including the three it loses. Each row prints the short answer and the page it was read off. The same answer in the words of the company itself is in that company’s own section further down.

What it actually lists

Where the signal comes from

This criterion is what is being counted, which decides what the answer means: a search volume, a vote, an engagement count and a set of published articles are four different definitions of popular.

Whether the outlets reporting it are named

This criterion is whether you can see who said it and go and read them, as distinct from a topic with a line going up beside it.

Whether an item has its own page you can link

How something gets on it

What it costs

Ground News

Pick it instead of this wire when. You want the same story from several political directions at once, with an outlet level bias and factuality rating attached. It does the one thing this wire does not attempt, which is tell you how the coverage of a story differs by who is doing the covering.

What it actually lists: News stories, each clustered from the outlets covering it. Its own page states that it shows how thousands of outlets across the political spectrum cover the same story, and names story clustering, coverage comparison timelines and geographical context among its features. Like a wire, the unit is a story rather than a term.

Where the signal comes from: Published coverage, plus third party bias and factuality ratings. The page states 50,000+ sources and lists bias ratings for every outlet, factuality scores, ownership detection and source diversity indicators. Its own FAQ states that the team does not evaluate the ratings itself and that bias and factuality are averaged from three independent news monitoring organisations, which is a disclosure this grid rates highly.

Whether the outlets reporting it are named: Yes, and it goes further than naming them. It compares left, centre and right coverage side by side with headlines, summaries and factuality ratings, and its Blindspot feature names stories one side of the spectrum did not cover. On this criterion it does more than this wire does, and the honest reading is that naming outlets is the floor and rating them is a further step.

Whether an item has its own page you can link: Yes, each story has its own page, and some of it is behind the subscription. Stories are pages on the site. The page states that blindspot analysis, the global coverage map, unlimited saved stories and full coverage comparison sit inside the Vantage subscription, so what an unpaid reader can link and what a subscriber can see are not the same.

How something gets on it: Outlets it indexes, with no submission route on the page read. The page states 50,000+ global sources and describes the ratings as coming from three third party monitors. No route for a publisher to ask to be added was on the page that was read, which is a statement about that page rather than about the company.

What it costs: A free tier, and Vantage at $8.33 a month billed annually. The page prints Vantage at $8.33 a month billed annually, cancel anytime and no hidden fees, and lists what the tier adds. A Get Started control is on the same page with no price beside it, so reading some of the site costs nothing.

Every line above was read on 2026-09-19 off a page Ground News publishes, listed in full at the foot of this page. Its own site is ground.news.

BuzzSumo

Pick it instead of this wire when. You are doing this for work and need to search the archive, export it, and be alerted about a brand or a keyword. It is the only entry here with alerts, an API and an export, and a wire has none of those.

What it actually lists: Content, by engagement, plus a trending feed of the last 24 hours. Its pricing page describes Trending as identifying and categorising the day’s most viral posts, everything published in the past 24 hours, and describes the Content Analyzer as an index of billions of pieces of content that surfaces the most engaging articles across any topic, URL or domain. The unit is a piece of content rather than a story.

Where the signal comes from: Engagement counts on published content. What it ranks by is how much a piece of content was engaged with, which is a different question from how many outlets covered a story and a different question again from how many people searched for it. Its Question Analyzer reads forum posts on Amazon, Reddit and Quora, so its population reaches past newsrooms.

Whether the outlets reporting it are named: Yes, by domain and by author, and that is the product. It indexes content by URL and domain and sells a media database built around what journalists create, so who published a thing is a first class field rather than an afterthought. What it does not do is assemble one story out of several outlets and hand you the set.

Whether an item has its own page you can link: Inside the account. There is no public page for a result. Results live in the app behind a login, and the plans are counted in users, searches and alerts. Nothing it surfaces has a public URL a stranger can open, which is the opposite trade from a wire.

How something gets on it: Whatever it has indexed, with no submission route on the page read. The pricing page describes the index as billions of articles and posts published around the globe and offers an API for automating against it. No route for asking to be indexed was on the page that was read.

What it costs: $199 a month for one user, billed yearly. $299 for five. The pricing page prints Content Creation at $199 a month billed yearly, one user, unlimited searches and 2 alerts, saving $478 a year against monthly; and PR and Comms at $299 a month billed yearly for 5 users, saving $718 a year. The page also offers a free trial with no length printed beside the control.

Every line above was read on 2026-09-19 off a page BuzzSumo publishes, listed in full at the foot of this page. Its own site is buzzsumo.com.

Exploding Topics

Pick it instead of this wire when. You want the thing before it is popular rather than while it is. It is the only entry here selling early rather than current, and that is a different job from every other row.

What it actually lists: Topics on the way up, from a database of more than 1.1 million. Its pricing page sells discovering trends 12+ months before they take off and describes an ever expanding database of 1.1M+ under the radar markets, products and investment opportunities, plus Meta Trends across tech, DTC, marketing, SaaS, healthcare, fitness, fashion and more. A topic here is a market, not a story.

Where the signal comes from: Growth and search metrics, with a forecast on top. The page describes deep dive data on any trend including growth, search metrics and channel level insights, and a forecasting feature it says is trained on millions of data points. It is the only entry on this grid that predicts rather than reports, which is also the only one whose output cannot be checked against a page that already exists.

Whether the outlets reporting it are named: No. A topic and its curve. Nothing in what the pricing page describes names who reported anything. The unit is a market or a product, and the evidence offered is a growth line rather than a set of articles.

Whether an item has its own page you can link: Inside the subscription. CSV export on the higher tiers. The page puts CSV Export on the Investor and Business tiers and not on Entrepreneur. What a reader can link publicly is not described on the pricing page at all.

How something gets on it: Whatever its own tracking surfaced, with no submission route on the page read. The page states that it tracks every topic on the internet to identify under the radar trends. No route for submitting a topic was on the page that was read. The same page carries the line that Exploding Topics is a trademark of Semrush Inc, which is worth knowing when reading its trend picks.

What it costs: $39, $99 or $249 a month, with a 7 day free trial. The pricing page prints Entrepreneur at $39 a month with 100 tracked trends and 10 trend analyses, Investor at $99 a month with 500 and 100, and Business at $249 a month with 2,000 and 500. Every tier offers a 7 day free trial. It is the only entry on this grid with no free reading tier at all.

Every line above was read on 2026-09-19 off a page Exploding Topics publishes, listed in full at the foot of this page. Its own site is explodingtopics.com.

Popwire on its own grid

What it actually lists: One trending story per post, across nine categories. The masthead reads one story per post and the outlets that filed it, named. Read on 2026-09-19 it held 106 stories across 9 categories, citing 305 outlets, with culture, gaming, sport, celebrity, music, TV, internet, film and style each carrying their own count. A story is the unit, so a topic with nothing published about it does not appear at all.

Where the signal comes from: Articles other newsrooms published, read and clustered by an engine. Nothing here counts searches, votes or shares. What the engine reads is what outlets filed, and a story exists on this wire because several of them wrote about the same thing. That is a narrower definition of popular than a search volume and it is the one that comes with a citation attached.

Whether the outlets reporting it are named: Yes. Every story lists the outlets and their headlines. Each post carries a block headed the reporting behind it, with the outlet, that outlet’s own headline and the link. The lead story on 2026-09-19 named WHEC.com, Yahoo Sports, Syracuse.com, Buffalo Bills and BuffaLowDown under one item. This is the criterion the wire exists for and it is the one it wins.

Whether an item has its own page you can link: Yes. Every story is a page at its own URL, free to read. Each item is published at /news/<slug> and listed in the sitemap, and the whole corpus is searchable at /search. There is no account and nothing is removed as it ages.

How something gets on it: Nothing can ask to be on it, and nothing can pay to be. There is no submission route anywhere on the site and no advertising. That cuts both ways: the population is whatever the engine read, so a story it did not pick up is absent with no way to correct that from outside, and there is no published list of the outlets it watches.

What it costs: Free, with no account. The privacy policy states that the site has no sign-in, no membership, no payments and no email list, and that it never asks for a name, an email address, a phone number or a postal address. The same page states that the site runs PostHog, proxied through this domain, which is the one thing it does collect.

Questions

What is the best free alternative to Google Trends?

It depends on what the number was for. Google Trends is free and nothing here replaces its search volume data, so if that is what you wanted, keep using it. If what you actually wanted was to know what is being reported right now, this wire and Ground News are both free to read and both give you the outlets, which Trends does not. BuzzSumo and Exploding Topics are neither free nor about searches.

Why is Reddit not on this page?

Fetched on 2026-09-19, reddit.com/r/popular served a document eight characters long, so nothing it publishes could be confirmed from the page itself. A figure about a named company that nobody read is the one error a comparison page cannot detect on its own, so it is absent rather than estimated. r/popular is a real answer to this question and anybody weighing it should open it.

What does a wire tell you that a trending list does not?

Who said it. A trending list gives you a term or a topic and leaves finding the reporting as a second step. Every item on this wire carries the outlets that filed it and each of their own headlines, so the step is already done and you can disagree with the summary by reading the source.

What is Popwire worse at than the rest of this grid?

Three things, all of them on the grid above. It ranks nothing and publishes no measure of how big a story is, where Google Trends and BuzzSumo both do. It rates no outlet for bias or factuality, where Ground News does. And its population is whatever its own engine read, with no published list of the outlets it watches and no way to ask for one.

How current are these figures?

Every cell carries the day it was read, and a job re-reads them rather than a person promising to. Every source on this page was fetched on 2026-09-19 and scripts/verify-alternatives.mjs re-fetches each one and fails when the literal string a cell came from is no longer on its page. Prices move, so a cell is worth as much as its date.

What was read, and when

This is the only page on this wire that states anything about another company in its own voice, so it carries the same contract the wire applies to every story: the page a figure was read off, the day it was read, and a string a job can go and look for. Prices and plans move, so every source carries its own read date rather than one date at the bottom of the page. scripts/verify-alternatives.mjs re-fetches each of these URLs and fails when the literal string a cell came from is no longer on its page.