Lady Gaga, Prince, Queen & More: Who Has the Best Billboard Hot 100 No. 2 Hit of All Time? Vote!
1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but some legendary songs have gotten as close as possible to the top spot, peaking at No. This week, Billboard rounded up our staff picks for the 100 best songs to peak at No. 2 on the Hot 100, celebrating the earworm hits that came agonizingly close to the top of the chart.
- ▪1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but some legendary songs have gotten as close as possible to the top spot, peaking at No.
- ▪This week, Billboard rounded up our staff picks for the 100 best songs to peak at No.
- ▪2 on the Hot 100, celebrating the earworm hits that came agonizingly close to the top of the chart.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | Billboard |
| Canonical URL | https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lady-gaga-prince-queen-best-hot-100-number-2-hit-vote-poll-1236315367/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:50:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-13T04:31:58.367Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-13T04:31:58.367Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cPoIXn6MKXrf · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Lady Gaga - Bad Romance Courtesy Photo Trending on Billboard if ( !window.pmc.harmony?.isEventAdScheduledTime() ) { pmcCnx.cmd.push(function() { pmcCnx({ settings: { plugins: { pmcAtlasMG: { iabPlcmt: 2, } } }, playerId: '4057afa6-846b-4276-bc63-a9cf3a8aa1ed', playlistId: 'b7dab6e5-7a62-4df1-b1f4-3cfa99eea709', }).render("connatix_contextual_player_div"); }); } else { // This should only be get called when page cache is not cleared and it's event time. window.pmc.harmony?.switchToHarmonyPlayer(); } Not every hit gets all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but some legendary songs have gotten as close as possible to the top spot, peaking at No. 2. This week, Billboard rounded up our staff picks for the 100 best songs to peak at No.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Billboard.
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