How Trending in Seoul works

What it is

Trending in Seoul shows what foreign visitors are checking right now, grouped into three lanes: Buying (products and brands), Happening (pop-ups and limited events) and Going (areas and experiences). Each topic links to the DealSeoul pages that help you act on it.

Signals we count

• News volume — Korean and English news coverage of Seoul tourism, shopping and pop-ups (Google News feeds).
• Weekly video traction — view-ranked Seoul haul and travel videos from the last 7 days (YouTube Data API).
• Traveler questions — what visitors are asking on public travel forums this week.
• DealSeoul pop-up data — our own curated pop-up sheet: new openings and closings within days.

Signals are grouped into topics with AI assistance; the source counts shown on each topic are computed from the grouped items, not generated. Topics with too little independent support are dropped rather than padded.

Ranking & cadence

• Ranked by countable source volume across the lanes, with our first-party pop-up data weighted slightly higher.
• Refreshes through the day (roughly every 2 hours). NEW marks a topic that entered the list; ▲▼ mark movement against the previous refresh; Ends soon comes from real closing dates.
• We show at most 10 topics. No fabricated percentages, ever — if a number appears, it is a count we can point to.

What we leave out

• Politics, celebrity gossip and anything unrelated to visiting Seoul.
• Topics we cannot tie to at least one verifiable public signal.
• Engagement-bait: a topic never ranks because it is loud, only because it is broadly present.

Grouping is AI-assisted and can be imperfect; venues, stock and dates change quickly in Seoul. Treat the list as a radar, not a guarantee, and check the linked pages before you go.