Inlinks Market Trends vs. Exploding Topics: Which is Best?

Understanding the trends that are shaping your industry is useful whether you're trying to develop new products, launch an e-commerce store, build topical authority, or create content.

Inlinks Market Trends and Exploding Topics are two tools that allow you to search industry topics and view associated data like search volume, trend popularity, and related topics. But the two apps are quite different — this guide will walk through what you need to know about both platforms so you can make the right decision for your budget and projects.

What is Inlinks Market Trends?

Inlinks is a semantic search engine optimization (SEO) tool that helps marketers identify what entities, or topics, their websites are associated with. You can also use the tool to help generate schema for your webpages — a functionality that's useful for SEO.

The platform's Market Trends feature is yet another way to access the platform's topic data, but presented in a way that's likely to be more useful to non-SEO professionals. When using Market Trends, you can browse popular topics in different industries, see related questions, and evaluate search volume for different topics.

Where Does Inlinks' Data Come From?

Inlinks Market Trends appears to use data similar to that found in Google Trends — and the company gets its SEO information via scraping Google search engine results pages (SERPs), too.

How Much Does Inlinks Market Trends Cost?

Inlinks' Market Trends data is available to subscribers with an Agency or Enterprise plan; pricing starts at $196 per month. This price also gives you access to other Inlinks SEO features including content optimization tools, API access, and unlimited user seats.

What is Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a tool for spotting and tracking emerging trends. The platform is entirely trend-focused (unlike Inlinks' primary focus on SEO). The Exploding Topics platform is useful for:

• E-commerce product development and marketing
• General digital marketing across B2B and B2C industries
• Startup research
• Amazon pricing strategy planning
• TikTok trend discovery

You can choose to browse the Exploding Topics database on your own or read trend reports that feature in-depth, expert analysis of the topics you should know about right now.

Where Does Exploding Topics Data Come From?

Exploding Topics gets its data points from a wide range of sources, including:

• Online forums
• Blogs
• News outlets
• Social media platforms

The company uses a mix of machine learning (to gather and initially sort data) and human expertise (to confirm and refine) to prepare its trend database and reports.

How Much Does Exploding Topics Cost?

Exploding Topics is free to use, but you'll be limited to basic trend information. An Exploding Topics Pro subscription gives you access to more in-depth data, trend forecasts, additional expert reports, product lists, and more. Paid plans start at $39 per month when billed annually.

Which Platform Shows You More Trending Topics?

Exploding Topics has a larger trend database than Inlinks Market Trends. For example, Inlinks offers access to 975 marketing industry topics, while Exploding Topics has data on over 36,000 marketing trends.

Exploding Topics offers more trend data across other industries, too. The following table shows how the two platforms' topic counts differ across select industries at the time of writing:

Exploding Topics also offers more industry categories to review than Inlinks Market Trends. The Exploding Topics database organizes topics into over 65 industries, while Inlinks offers 12 categories.

What Data Can You See Using Inlinks Market Trends and Exploding Topics?

Clicking on a trend within a category gives you different information on each platform, too.

How Inlinks Presents Search Trends

Inlinks' trend features are limited. (The app's features are mostly focused on SEO tools and techniques.) When you look up a trend in the Inlinks database, you'll see information including:

• Trend popularity changes over a month and a week
• Total search volume for the trend
• Related topics

You can also see search questions related to each trend, which is useful for content creation purposes.

How Exploding Topics Displays Trend Metrics

Every Exploding Topics trend detail page includes information about:

• Total search volume
• Change in search volume over time
• What the topic means or relates to
• Which social media channels are popular discussion spots for this topic
• Whether the trend is growing or slowing down
• Trend seasonality, volatility, and sentiment
• Future trend fluctuation forecasts
• Related trends

You aren't limited to the trend database, either. With an Exploding Topics Pro plan, you can also:

• Browse top TikTok trends
• Review Amazon product pricing and trends
• Explore meta trends reports to see how trends connect to each other
• Read past trend reports prepared by Exploding Topics' team of experts

When to Use Inlinks Market Trends vs. Exploding Topics

You can give my setup a try, too. Sign up for a free seven-day trial of Semrush One, then add on seven days of Exploding Topics Pro for free, too. This is the easiest way to explore the information that you can get from these two tools combined — and see how well it can support your work!