How to see trending topics on Twitter, on the web and in the app

To see trending topics on Twitter, open the Explore tab in the X app, or sign in at x.com and look for the Trends box. The list is tailored to you by default, and a few taps switch it to any country or city X has enough posts from.

The steps below follow X's help center as of October 2026. Menu names shift between app versions, so look for the same words if yours read slightly differently.

On a computer

1. Sign in at x.com.
2. Find the Trends box. X places it in several spots, including the Home timeline, Notifications, search results and profile pages.
3. Click Change in that box to pick a place. Keep leaves the list tailored to your account; Change lets you choose a nearby location or search for one.

On an iPhone

1. Tap your profile icon at the top.
2. Open Settings and privacy, then Privacy and safety.
3. Under Your X Activity, tap Content you see, then Explore settings.
4. The slider called Show content in your current location turns personalized trends on. Switch it off, then tap Explore locations to choose a country or city.

The trends themselves sit in the Trends section of the Explore tab.

On an Android phone

Tap the navigation menu icon or your profile icon, whichever your version shows, and pick Settings and privacy. From there the path matches the iPhone: Privacy and safety, Content you see, Explore settings.

Why your list differs from a friend's

An algorithm picks the topics, and it favors what is popular at this moment over what is popular all the time. By default it weighs who you follow, your interests and where you are, so two people in the same town can see different lists. Big world and local news stories appear for everyone either way. Setting a fixed location removes the tailoring, which is the fastest way to compare notes with someone.

A few details explain odd entries:

• Post count is one ranking factor, not the only one.
• Hashtags about the same thing are merged into one trend.
• Some entries show a category, a rough post count, who you know is posting, or a headline X added to say why the topic is trending.
• X can hold a topic back, for example one with profanity, while the posts themselves stay searchable.

Why your city is not listed

If a place is missing from the location picker, X says it is not getting enough posts from that area to build a list. Choose the nearest larger city, or use advanced search to find local posts on any subject.

Topics that trended earlier

The official list only covers the present. To read what people said about a past trend, search X for the word or hashtag. To learn when it trended and for how long, use an independent tracker. trends24.in keeps a 24-hour timeline with each topic's top position and duration, and getdaytrends.com offers pages for yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago or a custom date.

Trending topics for tech people

National lists mix politics, sports, music and entertainment, so a fight over a new AI model can fill your feed and never show up in them. Today's TechTwitter IO is the shortcut for that crowd: a free satirical daily paper of tech Twitter with launches, layoffs, ratios, feuds and outages, a Main Character of the Day and puzzles at the back. Its footer says that people, posts and quotes without a source link are parody or invented, so it is the read for the recap and the jokes, while the Explore tab stays the place for facts. If you only need one country's live list, X's own Explore tab is quicker than anything else here.