Continue is the leading open-source AI coding assistant, used by hundreds of thousands of developers inside VS Code and JetBrains. Add Trends MCP and Continue's agent mode can query live trend data from Google, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, npm, and 12 more sources - directly in your editor, without switching context.
Free API access
100 free requests per month. No credit card, no setup fee.
Replaced my manual Google Trends scraper in an afternoon. The data is clean and the latency is surprisingly low for a free tier.
We use it for keyword trend reports. The free monthly quota keeps us batching queries for weekly digests. Upgrading is there when we need more headroom.
Hooked it into my MCP server in like 20 minutes. The JSON response is well-structured and the docs are solid. Exactly what I needed.
We pipe weekly series into BigQuery for a few brand cohorts. Compared to maintaining our old Selenium job, this is boring in the best way. Uptime has been solid.
Great for slide-ready trend screenshots when leadership asks why we are prioritizing a feature. I wish the dashboard had saved views, but the API side is great.
Running it from Cursor with the MCP config took one try. I am not a trends person, but my side project now emails me when a niche keyword spikes hard week over week.
Using the growth endpoints to sanity-check retail names before I write up notes. Occasionally the normalization differs from what I see in the raw Google UI, but it is consistent run to run.
Pulling multi-source ranked lists into a notebook is straightforward. Error payloads are actually readable when I fat-finger a parameter, which matters more than people admit.
Does what it says. I knocked a star because onboarding assumed I already knew MCP wiring; a copy-paste block for Claude Desktop would have saved me 15 minutes.
We track TikTok hashtag momentum against paid spend in a Looker sheet. Not glamorous work, but it is the first tool my team did not argue about during rollout.
Retries are predictable and I have not seen weird HTML in responses (looking at you, scrapers). Would pay for a team key rotation flow, but for now we rotate manually.
Quick checks on retail buzz before we dig into filings. Not a silver bullet, but it is faster than opening twelve browser tabs and reconciling by hand.
Helpful for spotting whether a topic is a one-day meme or sticking around. I still cross-check with Search Console, but this gets me 80% of the signal in one call.
I demo this in workshops when people ask how to ground LLM answers in something fresher than training data. The MCP angle lands well with engineers who hate glue code.
Solid for client reporting. Billing is clear enough that finance stopped asking me what line item this is. Minor nit: peak hours can feel a touch slower, still acceptable.
I wired this behind a small CLI for contributors who want trend context in issues. Keeping the surface area tiny matters for OSS, and the schema has not churned on me yet.
Daily pulls for a 30-day window go straight into our internal scoreboard. Stakeholders finally stopped debating whose screenshot of Trends was newer.
We are pre-revenue, so free tier discipline matters. I hit the cap once during a brainstorm where everyone wanted to try random keywords. Learned to batch smarter.
Security review passed without drama: HTTPS, scoped keys, no bizarre third-party redirects in the chain we could find. That is rarer than vendors think.
I do not need this daily, but when App Store rank shifts look weird, having Reddit and news context in one place saves me from context switching across six apps.
I use it to see if a story is genuinely blowing up or just loud on one platform. It is not a replacement for reporting, but it keeps my ledes honest.
We moved off a brittle Playwright script that broke every time Google shuffled markup. Same data shape every week now, which is all I wanted from life.
Seasonal demand spikes line up with what we see in Amazon search interest here. Merch team stopped sending me screenshots from random tools that never matched.
Solid for client decks. I docked one star only because I still export to Sheets manually; a direct connector would be nice someday.
Steam concurrents plus Reddit chatter in one workflow beats our old spreadsheet ritual before milestone reviews.
Quick pulse on whether a feature name is confusing people in search before we ship copy. Cheap sanity check compared to a full survey.
Monitored from Grafana via a thin wrapper. p95 stayed under our SLO budget last month. One noisy day during a holiday but nothing alarming.
Narrative fights in meetings got shorter once we could point at the same trend line everyone agreed on. Sounds silly until you have lived through it.
Using normalized series as a weak prior in a forecasting experiment. Citation-friendly timestamps in the payload made reproducing runs less painful.
Approved for our pilot group after a quick vendor review. Would love SAML, not a blocker for our size.
YouTube search interest plus TikTok hashtags in one place helps me explain why a sponsor should care about a vertical without hand-waving.
Cron job hits the API before standup; Slack gets a compact summary. Took an afternoon to wire, has been stable for two quarters.
Useful for public-interest topics where search interest is a rough proxy for attention. I still triangulate with primary sources; this is one signal among several.
Runs in a VPC egress-only subnet with allowlisted domains. Fewer exceptions to explain to auditors than our last vendor.
Spotting when a topic is about to flood Discord saves my team from reactive moderation fires. Not perfect, but directionally right often enough.
For lean teams the ROI story writes itself. I would not build an in-house scraper for this anymore unless compliance forced it.
Examples in the docs match what the MCP actually returns. You would be surprised how rare that is in this category.
Pager stayed quiet. When something upstream flaked once, the error string told me which parameter to fix without opening logs first.
Students use it for coursework demos. Budget is tight so free tier matters; we coach them to cache aggressively.
Helps prep talking points when retail interest in our name swings after earnings. Not material disclosure, just context for Q&A prep.
Response sizes stay small enough for mobile hotspots. I hate APIs that dump megabytes for a sparkline.
What are you working on?
How will you connect?
Continue is the most-used open-source AI coding assistant, with deep VS Code and JetBrains integration, configurable model routing, and full Model Context Protocol support in agent mode. For developers who care about data sovereignty and extensibility, it's the default choice.
MCP support in Continue means you can connect any MCP-compatible server and have Continue's agent call it in response to natural language prompts. Trends MCP adds a live trend data layer: npm package download trends, GitHub and developer tool momentum, Google Search demand, Reddit discussion volume, and 12 more sources - all queryable from your editor without leaving the coding context.
Continue reads MCP server configuration from YAML or JSON files in your .continue/mcpServers/ folder. Create that folder if it doesn't exist, then add a file named trends-mcp.yaml with the following contents:
name: Trends MCP
version: 0.0.1
schema: v1
mcpServers:
- name: Trends MCP
type: streamable-http
url: https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp
env:
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY
Replace YOUR_API_KEY with the key from your Trends MCP account. Get a free key at trendsmcp.ai - 100 requests per day, no credit card required.
If you already have a JSON-format MCP config from Cursor, Claude Desktop, or Cline, Continue will also pick it up automatically if you place it in .continue/mcpServers/. The JSON format looks like this:
{
"trends-mcp": {
"type": "streamable-http",
"url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
"headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}
}
After saving, restart Continue or reload the window. Switch to agent mode and the four Trends MCP tools are available.
Once connected, Continue's agent can call Trends MCP tools in response to natural language. Some examples that are genuinely useful for developers:
"Is Bun's npm download growth still outpacing Node.js adoption signals on Google Search and Reddit?" - get_growth compares the two across npm downloads, Google Search, and Reddit discussion in one call.
"What JavaScript frameworks are seeing the sharpest week-over-week growth in npm downloads right now?" - get_ranked_trends against the npm source returns the fastest-growing packages ranked by recent growth rate.
"How has interest in Rust vs. Go changed over the past year on Google and Reddit?" - get_trends pulls a 12-month weekly time series for both keywords across both sources.
"What's trending in developer tools right now?" - get_top_trends returns currently rising topics in developer-adjacent platforms without requiring a keyword.
These are the kinds of research questions that normally require opening multiple browser tabs, pulling data manually, and reconciling numbers across sources. With Trends MCP in Continue, the agent handles it in one tool call and returns structured data it can immediately reason over and incorporate into its response.
The most common use case is technology evaluation. When you're deciding between two libraries, two frameworks, or two architectural patterns, download trends and search interest are signals worth checking - not to replace judgment, but to calibrate it. A library with declining npm downloads and flat Reddit discussion isn't necessarily wrong for your use case, but the trajectory is worth knowing before you build a production dependency on it.
The second common use case is content and documentation strategy. Developers who write technical content - blog posts, documentation, tutorials - benefit from knowing which topics are gaining search momentum before the topic is saturated with competing content. get_ranked_trends with a developer-adjacent source returns those rising topics before they're obvious.
Continue's agent mode is well-suited to this because it can chain tool calls. Ask it to "find the five fastest-growing npm packages this month and check each one's Google Search trend over the past year" and it will call get_ranked_trends to get the package list, then call get_trends for each one - returning a structured comparison you can act on immediately.
Connect
An API key is required to connect. Get your free key above, then copy the pre-filled config for your client.
Cursor
Cursor Settings → Tools & MCP → Add a Custom MCP Server
"trends-mcp": { "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp", "transport": "http", "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } }
+ Add to Cursor
Or paste into Mac / Linux — ~/.cursor/mcp.json
Windows — %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\mcp.json
↑ Get your free key above first — the config won't work without it.
Claude Desktop
User → Settings → Developer → Edit Config — add inside mcpServers
"trends-mcp": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "mcp-remote", "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp", "--header", "Authorization:${AUTH_HEADER}" ], "env": { "AUTH_HEADER": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } }
Mac — ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows — %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Fully quit and restart Claude Desktop after saving.
Claude Code (CLI)
claude mcp add --transport http trends-mcp https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp \ --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
Windsurf
Settings → Advanced Settings → Cascade → Add custom server +
"trends-mcp": { "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp", "transport": "http", "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } }
Mac / Linux — ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json
Windows — %USERPROFILE%\.codeium\windsurf\mcp_config.json
Or: Command Palette → Windsurf: Configure MCP Servers
VS Code
Extensions sidebar → search @mcp trends-mcp → Install — or paste manually into .vscode/mcp.json inside servers
"trends-mcp": { "type": "http", "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp", "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } }
Paste into .vscode/mcp.json, or:
Command Palette (⇧⌘P / Ctrl+Shift+P) → MCP: Add Server
Data Sources
All data is normalized to a 0-100 scale for consistent cross-platform comparison.
Tools
Four tools, organized by how you start. With a keyword, track history and growth. Without one, use discovery to see ranked movers or what is live right now.
You already have a keyword.
Chart how it moves over time and compare growth across sources.
No keyword required.
Ranked lists on one source with a growth sort you choose, or a live snapshot of what is trending across platforms.
Outputs
FAQ