How these numbers are made
Panel figures below are a snapshot taken on .
What we measure
The corpus behind every report, tool and chart on this site, as of 9 August 2026.
Product niches tracked end to end, from Home Fitness to Fishing Gear.
Entities within those verticals — the grain most analysis actually runs at.
Intent-tagged search phrases expanded from seed terms through public autocomplete.
Observations of which video held which position for which keyword.
Distinct videos seen ranking, each enriched with its own view and duration data.
Distinct creators observed ranking for at least one tracked keyword.
Search-engine result rows across 347k distinct domains.
Repeat measurements of the same videos over time — the basis of every movement figure.
These are counts of observations we hold, not estimates or projections. They grow every week; the date above is the version this page describes.
Where the signals come from
Seeds expand into keywords
Each sub-niche starts from a small set of seed terms, which we expand through public search autocomplete into the phrases people are actually offered. Every resulting keyword is tagged by intent — a “X vs Y” comparison is a different kind of search from “what is X”, and they are never pooled.
Results are collected per keyword
For each keyword we record which videos rank and in what order, and separately which pages rank on the web. Both are stored as timestamped observations attributed to the keyword and source they came from, so any figure can be traced back to its evidence.
Videos are enriched
Ranking videos are measured individually for view count, publication date and duration — the inputs to demand, and the reason we can measure attention in hours rather than clicks alone.
The panel is re-measured weekly
YouTube signals are re-collected on a weekly cycle and web results less often. Each pass appends a new snapshot rather than overwriting the last, which is what makes movement measurable at all — and why our history starts when the clock did, and cannot be backfilled.
The formulas applied to this data — demand, concentration, authority, opportunity — are written out in full on how it works→.
Rules we hold ourselves to
Most of the ways this data could mislead come from a handful of specific mistakes. These are the rules that prevent them — applied in the pipeline, not just in the writing.
We never report search volume
Nobody outside a search engine can observe how many times a phrase was typed. We measure something different and observable: how much attention the results actually earn. When we say demand, we mean noise-corrected view velocity — views divided by days since publication — never a query count.
Movement is always relative to its market
Our collection window drifts by a day or two week to week, and that drag moves every niche together. So we never publish an absolute level or a raw week-over-week change. Every movement figure is de-meaned against the same week’s cross-market median — it answers “did this move relative to its market”, which is the part that survives the measurement noise.
Matched pairs only
A video counts toward a movement figure only if we measured it in both weeks being compared. Comparing totals instead would measure how much we happened to scan that week, not how the market moved. This is why our movement numbers are ratios over a stable cohort rather than sums.
Complete weeks only
A week enters the published series on the calendar, not on how much of it we managed to collect. A partially-collected week is withheld rather than shown as a decline.
Each video counts once
A video ranking for eighty keywords is one video, not eighty. Counting per keyword-appearance would inflate demand roughly eightfold — a large and very easy mistake to make with this shape of data.
Phantom spikes are zeroed
A brand-new video with a million views is usually an artifact of when we measured it, not sustained pull. Those are excluded from demand rather than allowed to dominate it.
What these numbers cannot tell you
We see 15 niches, not all of YouTube
Every figure is scoped to the verticals we track. A creator’s standing is their standing within a measured market — not a platform-wide ranking. Channels outside our seeded keyword space are simply not observed.
Brands are extracted, not curated
Brand names are currently pattern-matched out of keywords and domains rather than maintained as a verified registry. Brand-level figures are directionally sound but should not be treated as precise, and we do not publish them as headline numbers.
The history is young
Weekly view snapshots began accumulating recently, so trend figures rest on a handful of clean weeks. They are enough to rank movement within a week; they are not enough for seasonality, and we do not present them as such.
We measure reach, not revenue
Views, positions and engagement are observable. Conversions, revenue and audience intent behind a click are not. We do not model them, and any figure implying we do is being read too generously.
Engagement is partial
We collect view counts and durations, not likes or comments, so we cannot compute engagement-rate metrics that depend on them.
Using these figures
Our figures are free to quote, in research, reporting or your own writing, with attribution and a link. We ask two things, both of which follow from the rules above: quote the figure with the date it was taken, and describe movement as relative to its market rather than as absolute growth.
SourceSignal, Methodology, 9 August 2026. Based on a panel of 57.3M YouTube ranking observations across 15 product niches.
Questions about the method?
If you are citing this work and need detail we haven’t published — window definitions, per-niche panel sizes, how a specific figure was derived — ask and we’ll answer.
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