How do I find trending videos or challenge?

tiktok hides this on purpose lol, theres no trending tab in the app. few ways to do it:

free/native ways: tiktok creative center (search it on google, its a separate website tiktok runs for advertisers) shows trending hashtags, sounds and videos by country. also in the app, tap a sound on any video and you can see how many videos used it recently, fast-growing sound = trend forming. and the search bar shows suggested searches which are basically live trends.

problem with those: they show whats ALREADY big, by the time a challenge is on creative center everyones done it. youre catching trends at the peak, not the rise.

the way i do it: i built a research tool called hooklayer that pulls whats RISING vs whats already saturated in a specific niche, live data from google trends + youtube velocity + reddit + a tiktok corpus. it tells you the early-signal stuff with low competition, which is when jumping a trend actually pays. it also pulls the actual top videos with numbers so you see the format, not just the hashtag.

how to connect it if you use claude (or any mcp client): go to hooklayer.dev, grab the mcp url, add it as a connector/integration in claude settings, done. then you literally just ask "whats trending in [your niche]" and it pulls live data. free tier so you can test it.

whats your niche btw? drop it and ill pull whats rising in it right now so you can see what the data looks like