Google Trends doesn’t expose a direct API for “what’s trending right now in my niche”, but it does expose RSS feeds for trending topics on a per-country basis. AI Content Generator’s Live News Mode can consume these RSS feeds directly — meaning you can build a campaign that picks up trending topics in your country and rewrites them into short, AI-generated articles within minutes of the trend appearing.
This tutorial walks through the entire workflow: which Google Trends RSS URLs to use, how to plug them into Live News Mode, how to filter the trends to your niche, the cadence settings that match the half-life of a trend, and the title presets that produce the most clickable summaries.
By the end you’ll have a campaign that ingests Google’s daily trending topics, filters them to your niche, summarises each in 400–600 words with the trend cited, and publishes within 30–60 minutes of the trend going hot.
The Google Trends RSS URLs you need
Google Trends exposes two main RSS feed families that work for editorial automation.
- Daily trending searches —
https://trends.google.com/trending/rss?geo=US(replace US with IT, GB, FR, DE, etc.). Returns the top 20 trending queries of the day for that country. - Realtime trending searches —
https://trends.google.com/trending/rss?geo=US&hours=4. Returns trends from the last few hours, refreshing more frequently than the daily feed.
For a niche editorial blog, the daily feed is usually enough — covering same-day trends with a 24-hour publishing window. For news-style sites that need to react to fast-moving stories, the realtime feed is required.
Step 1 — Open Live News Mode and configure RSS
Inside the campaign editor, open the Live News Mode metabox and enable it. Set News source to RSS. Paste the Google Trends RSS URL into the RSS Feed URL textarea — one URL per line if you want multiple countries.
Step 2 — Filter trends to your niche
Google Trends doesn’t filter by topic — every trending query in the country lands in the feed regardless of relevance to your blog. AI Content Generator handles the niche filter at the Extra AI instructions level: tell the AI to skip items that don’t fit your niche.
When a trending item from the Google Trends RSS doesn't match the niche of this blog (WordPress, AI plugins, SEO automation), skip the item entirely — do not produce an article. Only summarise trends that clearly relate to the niche.
With this instruction, the campaign might publish only 1–3 articles per day even when the feed contains 20 trending items — because most trending topics are off-niche. That’s the right outcome: relevance beats volume.
Step 3 — Tune cadence for trend half-life
A trending topic has a short half-life — 6 to 24 hours before it stops being interesting. The Live News Mode cadence settings should match:
- Max news items to fetch: 20 (matches Google Trends RSS output).
- Max posts per run: 3 (don’t drain the queue; let the niche filter decide).
- News search window (hours): 12 (older trends aren’t relevant anymore).
- Fetch RSS every: 60 minutes (Google Trends updates roughly hourly).
Step 4 — Pick a title preset matched to trending content
The title presets dropdown (Keep original / SEO optimised / Engaging / Formal / Question) handles how the AI rewrites each trending query into a publishable title. For Google Trends content, “Engaging” or “Question” usually outperforms “Keep original” because trending queries are often single phrases (“Claude 4 release”) that need expansion into proper titles (“What does Claude 4 mean for WordPress AI plugins?”).
Test all three presets in the first week and converge to whichever produces the highest click-through rate on your blog’s index page.
Step 5 — Write a summary prompt for trends
Google Trends gives you only a query string — not a full news article to summarise. The summary prompt in Extra AI instructions has to handle this: ask the AI to research the trend internally (using its training-knowledge plus the trend metadata), produce a short explainer with context, and end with an editorial paragraph.
Treat each item from the Google Trends RSS as a trending topic
to explain to a {niche} audience:
- Open with the trending query and what triggered it.
- Provide 2-3 paragraphs of context (why now, who's affected).
- Explain the {niche} angle: what does this mean for our readers?
- 400-600 words. Conversational but informed tone.
- Never fabricate quotes or invent statistics.
- Cite the trending status: "According to Google Trends data
from {date}…"
Step 6 — Mind the freshness vs accuracy trade-off
Google Trends RSS gives you the topic, not the underlying source. The AI’s interpretation of “why this is trending” comes from its training data and might be wrong for very fresh events. Two safeguards:
- Pair with a news source — add the Google News RSS for the same niche as a second RSS feed in the same Live News Mode panel. The combined queue contains both “what’s trending” and “what news matches the trend”, letting the AI cross-reference.
- Skip events the AI doesn’t recognise — add an instruction “If you cannot identify why the trending query is hot, skip the item instead of guessing.” This prevents hallucinated coverage of events the AI lacks context for.
Step 7 — Verify with a test fetch
Click Run news fetch now. The plugin pulls the latest Google Trends RSS items, applies the niche filter, produces summaries for the matching ones. Inspect them: are the explanations factually accurate? Does the niche angle make sense? Is the date cited correctly?
If anything reads as fabricated, strengthen the “no hallucination” guards in the prompt. Trending-topic content is high-traffic but high-stakes — a single article confidently stating something false damages trust for months.
Troubleshooting
- Empty queue — the niche filter is too strict. Loosen the niche definition in Extra AI instructions.
- Off-niche items slip through — the niche filter is too vague. Be more specific: “Skip everything not directly about WordPress, AI plugins, hosting or SEO”.
- Articles feel speculative — your summary prompt allows the AI too much freedom. Add stronger anti-hallucination clauses.
- Trends are stale by publication time — fetch frequency is too low. Raise to every 30 minutes or switch to the realtime Trends RSS.
- Same trend covered twice in different articles — Anti-duplicates is off. Switch to Strict.
You’re done
That’s the full Google Trends pipeline via Live News Mode RSS: paste the Trends RSS URL into the Live News Mode panel, filter trends to your niche via Extra AI instructions, tune cadence for trend half-life, pick an engaging title preset, write a summary prompt with anti-hallucination guards, verify on a test fetch.
From here your blog reacts to trending topics within an hour, with niche-appropriate angles, source-cited explanations, and editorial commentary. The reaction time and coverage breadth approach what a small newsroom would achieve — at a fraction of the cost.