What is seed merit Seed merit is the boost or traffic surge that social media algorithms give your content when you publish early on a trend or a topic that is beginning to gain traction. When you are ahead of the curve, you benefit from seed merit, because platforms are more likely to promote your content as the topic starts to take off.

For example, imagine you were one of the first people to create a video about “portable bathtubs.” Later, if “portable bathtubs” suddenly became a major trend and everyone started talking about it, your early content would receive seed merit. This means the algorithm would push that video more strongly, along with any future content you produce on the same topic.

This early advantage can lead to extremely high traffic and rapid growth. Many successful creators and multi-million-dollar businesses attribute a large part of their success to seed merit, because the initial boost helped them scale quickly when a trend was still emerging.

The seed merit traffic surge can come from several sources, including:

SERPs (search results) across different social media platforms — especially Google
Main homepages and recommendation feeds on social networks
Relevant and trending hashtags
“Original sound” recognition on TikTok and similar platform signals