When you run a search in OverHeard, every question comes with an amber bar and a number from 0 to 100. That's demand heat. It answers one thing: how loudly is this question being asked?
It's the only place we use that amber colour, on purpose. If you see amber anywhere in OverHeard, it means demand, and nothing else.
What goes into the score
Demand heat combines three signals.
- Recurrence across sources. How often the same question, or a close rewording of it, shows up in different places. One thread asking something is an anecdote. The same worry across several threads and forums is a pattern.
- Prominence in autocomplete. Search suggestions reflect what people type when they're alone with a search box. A question that autocomplete offers early and often is one a lot of people start typing.
- Reddit engagement. Upvotes and replies on the threads where the question appears. A question that pulls in a long reply chain is one people care about and haven't settled.
AI is used to classify and dedupe the questions, so five phrasings of the same worry count toward one question instead of cluttering the board as five weak ones.
Signal-based and measured heat
On the free plan, heat is signal-based: it comes from the three signals above, and the card says so. On paid plans, measured search volume and ranking difficulty come in from DataForSEO. When measured volume is available, it's blended into the score and the card is marked as measured.
We label this clearly because the two mean slightly different things. Signal-based heat tells you a question is being asked a lot in public. Measured heat adds how many people search for it. Both are useful. You should always know which one you're looking at.
How to read it
Heat is relative, not a promise. A score of 80 doesn't mean a post will get a certain amount of traffic. It means this question is being asked much more loudly than one at 30, within the same market. Use it to compare questions against each other, not to forecast results.
A few patterns are worth knowing:
- High heat, low difficulty (on paid plans) is where to start. Lots of people are asking and it's realistic to rank.
- High heat, high difficulty is still worth writing, but expect it to take longer. Link to it from easier posts once they exist.
- High recurrence but modest search volume can be an early signal: people are asking each other before they've started searching. Worth watching.
- Low heat doesn't mean useless. A low-heat question close to purchase can still convert well. Heat is one input, not the whole decision.
Heat plus the buyer's journey
Every question on the board is also mapped to a stage of the buyer's journey. Put the two together and you get a better plan than either alone. A board full of hot, early-stage questions gets you readers. Mixing in a few hot questions from later stages gets you readers who are close to buying.
Heat tells you how loud a question is. The journey tells you who's asking it.
Don't skip the provenance
Before you commit to a question, click into it. Every question shows its source, how often it recurs and when it was last seen. A high score on a question last seen months ago means something different from the same score on one that came up this week. The number gets you to the right questions quickly. The provenance tells you whether to trust it.