X Radar: what it tracks and who actually gets it

#Quick answer

X Radar is X's real-time keyword monitor, reachable at x.com/i/radar. You type a query in ordinary X search syntax and it returns a volume chart for that conversation plus the posts driving it. Radar needs a paid subscription: X's Premium page lists Radar Search under Premium+ ($40 a month on the web), while X's Premium Business page says the full version belongs to Premium Business accounts and that Premium+ users get a limited one. X has labelled it Beta since the October 2024 rollout, and still does.

Last updated: September 2026

#TL;DR

This is the most useful thing X sells that almost nobody describes accurately. Search results for it are mostly rewrites of the October 2024 launch coverage, which said Premium+ subscribers were getting access. That was true then. Today X's own Premium Business page tells a different story: Radar sits in the business tier, Premium+ gets a cut-down version, and the query allowance rises with what you pay. If you were planning to buy Premium+ for Radar specifically, that distinction is the whole decision.

#What Radar actually does

The feature started life as Insights, previewed in August 2024. On 17 October 2024 the @premium account announced the rename and the wider rollout, describing it as "our real-time trend analysis tool (formerly known as Insights)" and noting that access was reaching "select Premium+ users" as an early version (Premium on X, 17 October 2024).

The workflow is short:

1. Open x.com/i/radar.
2. Enter a query. Exact phrases in quotes, OR between alternates, - to exclude, min_faves: to filter by engagement, @handle for an account.
3. Read the chart, then read the posts that produced it.

What you get back is conversation volume over time for that query, and the individual posts alongside it, so you can tell whether a spike is one viral post or a thousand people independently annoyed about the same thing (Social Media Today, 20 October 2024).

That is the honest scope of the product. No sentiment scoring, no competitor dashboards, no documented alerting. A line, a number, and the posts underneath.

#Who gets Radar, and what "limited" means

This is where the ranking pages are stale. Two of X's own help pages, read together, give the current picture.

X's Premium page describes the top tier like this: "Premium+: Includes all Premium features with additional benefits like higher limits on Grok, no ads anywhere on X, largest reply prioritization, Radar Search, and Articles" (Wayback capture 31 August 2026).

X's Premium Business page is more specific, and more limiting:

Radar (Beta). We're excited to introduce Radar. Monitor keywords, track conversations, and stay on top of trends you care about. Radar is available to Premium Business accounts with a limited version available to Premium+ users. Full Access subscribers receive the highest number of queries available.

Wayback capture, 23 September 2026. Three things fall out of that paragraph:

The tier table on the same page confirms the naming: Basic lists "Radar Basic", Full Access lists "Radar Pro". Premium Business Full Access also costs $50 a month per additional affiliate account in the US.

There is a cap, and X will not tell you what it is. "Full Access subscribers receive the highest number of queries available" only makes sense if every tier is metered. No number is published for any of them, so the safe assumption for a Premium+ subscriber is a small handful of live queries, not an agency-style watch list. If Radar is the reason you are subscribing, that unknown is the risk you are taking.

Worth knowing too: every Premium Business account carries Premium+ inside it, so the business tiers are a superset rather than a separate product line. The full breakdown of what else that includes is in X Premium Business, and tier-by-tier consumer pricing sits in X Premium price.

#Radar versus advanced search

The query language is the same one you already know. If you can write a working X advanced search string, you can write a Radar query, and the operators behave the same way.

So the real question is what the chart is worth to you.

What advanced search gives you: matching posts, free, no subscription, with filters for date, engagement, account and language. A snapshot.

What Radar adds: the shape of the conversation over time. Volume, and with it velocity, which is the part a list of posts cannot show you. Something mentioned 40 times an hour and rising is a different situation from something mentioned 40 times an hour and falling, and the two look identical in a search results page.

That is genuinely useful if your job involves reacting fast to a live conversation. It is close to worthless if you want month-over-month reporting, and that gap is not a bug. Third-party walkthroughs of Radar describe daily activity graphs covering a short recent window rather than a deep archive, and X publishes no documentation of the window at all, so treat it as a now tool and verify anything longer yourself before you build a process on it.

#What Radar does not do

Being specific here saves money.

• It does not cover other platforms. X data only, which is the point but also the ceiling.
• It has no documented export. Nothing in X's help pages describes a CSV or an API route out of Radar, so anything you want to keep, you screenshot or retype.
• It is not your account analytics. Radar watches the conversation; your own post performance lives in the native dashboard covered in X analytics.
• It is not the API. If you need programmatic access to search results, that is a separate and now metered relationship, priced out in how to get an X API key.
• It is still Beta. X's own label, nearly two years after launch. Features in that state get changed and occasionally removed without notice.

#The free version of Radar's job

If the price is the blocker, most of Radar's practical value can be reassembled from things you already have. It takes more clicks and gives you no chart.

Saved advanced searches. Write the query once in advanced search, bookmark the resulting URL, and open it on a schedule. You lose the volume line. You keep the matching posts, which is the raw material anyway.

Lists as a manual watch surface. A tight list of the 20 accounts who always break news in your niche beats a keyword query for a lot of monitoring work, because the humans filter for you. How to use Lists on X covers building and sorting them.

Trends, read properly. The trending surface answers a related question badly and a different question well, and the difference matters. X trending topics explains what actually gets a topic listed.

Column layout instead of one feed. X Pro, the old TweetDeck, puts several searches side by side, which is the closest free-ish thing to a monitoring console. It moved behind Premium+ in March 2026, so it is bundled with the same subscription that gets you limited Radar. Is TweetDeck still free has the current state.

Stacked together, those four cover the spotting job at the cost of your attention rather than $40 a month. What they do not replicate is velocity, and if reacting inside the first hour is how your account earns anything, that number is the one you are actually buying.

#Is it worth buying Premium+ for?

Depends entirely on whether you act on what you see.

If you run a brand account where an emerging complaint thread needs a response before it compounds, a live volume curve on your own name is worth real money, and $40 a month is not a serious number against that. Same if you trade or cover markets, where being early to a conversation is the whole edge.

If you are a creator trying to pick topics, be honest about the loop. Spotting a rising conversation only helps if you can publish into it while it is still rising, and most people cannot, because the bottleneck was never information. It was the twenty minutes needed to write the post. Radar will happily show you eleven opportunities a day that you do not act on.

That bottleneck is the part worth fixing first. X-Autopilot drafts and posts from real Chrome on your own Mac, so your session cookie stays on your machine instead of a shared cloud service, which is a smaller detection surface than cloud schedulers rather than any kind of guarantee. Browser automation is not a sanctioned route under X's automation rules, and reading those directly beats trusting any vendor's summary of them, including ours.

#Bottom line

Radar is X's keyword monitor at x.com/i/radar: write a query in search syntax, get volume over time plus the posts behind it. Premium+ at $40 a month buys a limited version, the full one belongs to Premium Business, and the query allowance rises with the tier without X ever publishing a number. It has been in Beta since October 2024.

Buy it if you respond to live conversations for a living. Skip it if you would just be watching, because free advanced searches and a well-built list cover watching, and the missing piece was never the data.