A term spikes on Google Trends overnight, tied to a celebrity controversy, a viral video, or an algorithm change nobody outside a small technical community will remember in a month. Every outlet with a real-time dashboard sees the same spike at the same moment, and most of them treat it as an assignment.
That reflex is understandable. A spike represents attention that is available right now, and attention is the raw material every publication depends on. Chasing it produces short-term traffic with near-certainty, which is a rare thing to be certain about in media.
What a spike does not represent is significance. Search interest measures curiosity, not consequence, and a great deal of what generates curiosity — a scandal, a rumor, a coincidence dressed up as a pattern — has no lasting relationship to anything that will matter in a year, or even in a week.
BuzzFeed News ran the actual experiment here and it is worth sitting with. Its newsroom was built substantially around content engineered to travel through Facebook's News Feed, and when Meta deprioritized news links in its ranking through 2023, the traffic that had underwritten the newsroom did not gradually decline — it fell fast enough that BuzzFeed shut the newsroom down within the year. A publication optimized entirely for what a platform's graph rewards is only as durable as that graph's willingness to keep rewarding it.
A term will keep spiking on that dashboard every hour, and most of them will keep going unanswered here. That is not indifference to what readers are curious about. It is the specific, avoidable mistake BuzzFeed News already made at scale, and there is no version of watching that happen that makes repeating it look like a good bet.