niche-research.

Most "trending in your niche" tools rely on cached search APIs and surface stories that are weeks old, dressed up as recent. niche-research is structured differently. It drives a real browser through real feeds in real time, verifies the publish date on every item, and excludes anything older than seven days. The cost is that the skill takes longer to run than a search-API call. The benefit is that the output is actually current.

The structural problem with niche research is that recency and depth pull against each other. Cached search results give depth and stale dates. Manual scrolling gives recency and no depth. niche-research gets both by using Claude for Chrome to drive a real browser session through three feed surfaces with a strict seven-day window, then synthesising the harvest into themed angles.

§01What it does

The skill checks for a niche in about-me.md or asks the writer to type one. Then it picks the strongest available browser path: Claude for Chrome extension first, Playwright MCP second, WebSearch with WebFetch as the last-resort fallback. Each path produces less reliable feed access in that order, so the skill explicitly prefers the one that scrolls feeds the way a human researcher would.

The browse pass goes to Reddit's home feed and r/popular, scrolls multiple screens, opens niche-relevant posts, checks the timestamp on every one, and discards anything older than seven days. Then it does the same on X's For You feed. Then it runs five Google searches with the past-week filter applied ([niche] news, [niche] launch, [niche] controversy, [niche] research, [niche] regulation), opens the top results, locates the visible publish date on the page itself, and excludes anything where the date is missing, unclear, or older than seven days.

The synthesis pass groups the verified items into themes, ranks themes by a combination of attention, debate intensity, and novelty, and outputs the twenty most relevant ones with a one-line angle for each. The output is shaped to feed directly into content-matrix or post-writer.

§02Date verification is the entire skill

Most automated research tools fail on the date verification step because they trust the search engine's past 7 days filter, which often includes pages that were re-indexed (republished, lightly edited, or freshness-faked) rather than originally written in the window. niche-research opens the page and looks at the visible publish date in the article body. If there is no visible date, the item is discarded. That filter alone removes a meaningful percentage of what other tools would have surfaced.

The browse-first approach also captures the thing search APIs cannot: discussion. A story that ran in three publications and is being argued about on Reddit and X is more useful for content than a story that ran in five publications and went nowhere. The feed-scrolling pass is what surfaces the discussion signal, which is exactly the signal a content writer needs.

§03Setup

# Preferred path:
#   Install Claude for Chrome and grant browse permission
#   Open a blank tab before triggering the skill

# Trigger phrases:
#   "research my niche"
#   "what's trending"
#   "find stories"
#   "this week's news"

Playwright MCP works as a fallback if the Chrome extension is not available, with the trade-off that some feed scrolling behaviour is less natural under Playwright than under live browser control.

§04Caveats

The skill is slower than a search-API call. A full pass takes a few minutes, mostly spent verifying dates on individual pages. That is the price of accuracy.

Login-walled feeds are a constraint. The skill performs best when the writer is logged into Reddit and X in the active browser session, because logged-in feeds personalise to the niche the writer cares about and surface deeper context than logged-out alternatives.