Introducing Topics: Following the News Beyond the Headlines

We've recently introduced Topics to Your News Headlines, and the idea behind them is pretty simple: make it even easier to see what's happening in the world at a glance.

Your News Headlines has always been about cutting through the noise and showing you the biggest news stories. But sometimes one headline catches your attention and you want to know what else is happening around that subject.

That's where Topics come in.

Discovering connected news

News stories don't exist in isolation. The same people, places and organisations often appear across completely different headlines, and those connections aren't always obvious at first glance.

With Topics, you can click on a name in one headline and discover other news involving that subject. For example, click on Donald Trump, Ukraine or Israel and you'll find all the headlines we've collected that mention them.

Or perhaps you've noticed the IMF appearing in the news today and you're wondering what else has been happening with it. Click on the topic and you can quickly browse other headlines involving the IMF, without having to search through several different news websites.

You might start with a headline about an economic announcement and end up discovering another story involving the same organisation. It's a simple way to explore connections between the news stories we're collecting.

And because we backfilled our archive back to August 2023, you can also browse older headlines involving the same topic.

What's trending today?

We also wanted an even quicker way to answer a simple question: What are the big subjects in the news today?

That's why we've introduced Trending Topics.

Rather than just showing individual headlines, Trending Topics gives you a quick overview of which people, places and organisations are getting the most attention across the news sources we follow.

It's another way of cutting through the noise and seeing what's dominating the news without having to read dozens of articles.

How it works

Every headline that comes into Your News Headlines now gets tagged with the topics it's about: the people, places and organisations it mentions.

The tagging is done automatically using a bit of natural language processing that picks out names in each headline.

The tricky part is that news outlets don't always agree on what to call things. One source says "Trump", another says "President Trump", and another says "Donald Trump". One says "US", another says "America".

So behind the scenes, each topic has a list of synonyms, and all those variations get folded into one topic page.

We are still working through a few glitches, but it's already giving us some interesting insights into what the world's news has been focused on.

Our five most used topics

So far, we've tagged over 510,000 headlines with around 75,000 different topics.

Here are the five that appear most often:

1. USA — 50,364 headlines
2. Donald Trump — 37,741 headlines
3. Israel — 34,929 headlines
4. UK — 30,236 headlines
5. Russia — 21,606 headlines

None of these are much of a surprise.

Just outside the top five are Gaza, Ukraine, China, Iran and Australia.

Looking back at the news

On desktop, each topic page also includes a small chart showing how frequently that topic has appeared in the headlines over time.

I particularly like this feature because you can see how the attention given to a topic changes. It might barely appear for months, suddenly spike when something major happens, and then gradually fade away again. Or it might remain in the headlines for years.

It's a different way of looking at the news, and one I hope to expand on.

What's next?

Topics are still a fairly new addition, and there's plenty more we'd like to do with them.

We're already working on improvements to how topics are identified and grouped, as well as fixing some of the inevitable glitches that come with automatically analysing hundreds of thousands of headlines.

We've also got some ideas for new features that will make it easier to discover related news and explore the subjects that interest you.

For now, have a look at our Trending Topics or click on a topic from any headline and see where it takes you.

As always, the goal remains the same: the biggest news stories, without the noise.

Figures as of 13 October 2026.