"Give me 10 blog ideas" gets you evergreen mush — plausible headlines that target nobody and compete with a thousand identical posts. The failure is that they're guesses: no evidence anyone actually wants them.

Topic Scout turns a niche into 8–12 ranked topic candidates, each backed by at least 2 live, dated sources — a real search signal, a community complaint with a link, a timely news hook, or a named gap in a competitor's top-ranking post. A topic with no evidence does not make the list.

It searches every niche from three angles — community pain, news hook, and competitor gap — so you break out of the single-SEO-bubble that one phrasing traps you in. Each surviving candidate is scored on impact (how much the reader wants it) and difficulty (competition + effort), then ranked so you know what to pick up first. The output is a clean table plus per-candidate evidence blocks with real citations, dates, and access dates.

Topic Scout is the free on-ramp to the Content Ops Suite — the full anti-slop pipeline (topic → brief → draft → repurpose → pre-publish QA). No API keys: works with plain Claude Code (WebSearch/WebFetch).