Blog · · Benatar Brands
How to track what is trending on X for your niche with an AI assistant
The trending list on X is built for everyone, so most of it has nothing to do with your business. The useful version is narrower: what the people in your niche are posting about, where your buyers are, this week. Here is how to set that up with Grok Bot, and how to turn what it finds into posts.
The running example is hypothetical: an independent coffee roaster that sells online and has one café.
Step 1: Pick the accounts before the keywords
Start with 10 to 20 accounts whose posts you would read anyway: suppliers, trade press, a few peers, a few vocal customers. X's search operators include from:, which matches posts from a specific account, and OR to group several. A search like (from:account1 OR from:account2 OR from:account3) -is:retweet gives Grok Bot a short, readable feed of what your chosen voices said.
Step 2: Write searches the way X recommends
X's guide to building a query warns against single broad keywords. Its example is "happy," which it says matches more than 200,000 posts a day. The guide's method is to start specific, look at what comes back, then narrow or broaden.
For the roaster, that might mean starting with ("cold brew" OR "single origin") lang:en -is:retweet, reading a sample, and adding exclusions for whatever junk keeps appearing. Ask Grok Bot to show you ten matching posts before you save a search. If half are irrelevant, the search needs work.
Step 3: Check trends where your buyers are
X publishes trends by location, identified by a WOEID. The documentation lists examples such as Worldwide, United States, New York and Los Angeles. A roaster with one café cares about its own city more than the worldwide list. Ask Grok Bot for the trends in that city and the country, and to flag only those that touch your topic.
Step 4: Filter the noise
Most noise falls into a few buckets, and the operators handle them:
- -is:retweet drops reposts, so each idea appears once
- -is:reply drops reply chains when you only want original posts
- -is:nullcast excludes promotional posts
- lang:en (or your language) removes posts you cannot use
- A minus sign before a word removes a recurring off-topic match
Then give Grok Bot a plain-language rule on top: skip giveaways, skip posts with no detail, and skip anything you would not want your brand next to.
Step 5: Check whether it is actually rising
A trend list shows what is popular now, not whether it matters to your niche. X's Post counts endpoints return how many posts match a query over time, grouped by minute, hour or day, for the last seven days. Ask Grok Bot to compare daily counts for your topic search across the week. A count that keeps climbing deserves a look. One spike on one day often does not. X notes that counts may not exactly match search results, so read them as direction, not precision.
Step 6: Turn a trend into a post idea
A trend becomes useful once it answers a question your customers have. Ask Grok Bot for each idea in this shape:
- The trend, with two or three example posts linked
- The question underneath it that your customers would ask
- What you know first-hand that answers it
- One draft post in your voice
If step 3 is empty, skip the idea. Commenting on a trend you have no real view on reads as filler.
Grok Bot does not publish to X. When you want to use a draft, it gives you a link that opens X's post composer with the text filled in. X calls these Web Intents. You read it, edit it and post it yourself.
Step 7: Choose a cadence
Grok Bot can run this as a scheduled routine, so pick the rhythm that matches how you post:
- Weekly suits most small businesses. One summary on Monday: what grew, which accounts started a conversation, three post ideas.
- Daily makes sense if your niche moves fast or you post every day. Keep it to the three items most relevant to your searches, and accept "nothing today."
Start weekly. Move to daily only if the weekly summary keeps arriving too late to act on.
If you already run a daily morning brief, this can be a weekly companion: the brief covers what happened, this covers what to post about.
Limits
Grok Bot reads public posts. It will not see private accounts, and it can misread sarcasm or a post out of context. Open the example posts before you write about a trend.
Setting up routines like this is part of our embedded AI partnership. If you want help choosing the accounts and searches for your niche, book a free session and we will build the first version with you.
Related service: embedded AI partnership.
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