Google Trends is invaluable for market research, tracking brand sentiment, and competitor monitoring. Unfortunately, there's no official Google Trends API, so it can be difficult to get the data you need. Our Google Trending Searches scraper acts as a powerful Google Trends API. It lets you scrape and extract data on what people are searching for on Google Search, including related queries and with no limits or quotas.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends analyzes the popularity of the top search queries in Google Search. It covers a range of countries, regions, and languages, and uses graphs to let users compare relative search volume for different queries over time.
Google Trends lets you enter a search term and it will tell you how popular that term was over your selected time frame. You can enter more terms and they will be compared. You can change the region and can sometimes even drill down to city level.
Google Trends also allows you to specify category and sub-category, in case you need to focus on a particular meaning of your search term. And you can choose different types of search, including Image, News, Shopping, or YouTube.
What is Google Trending Searches?
Tucked away in the left-hand menu is the Trending Searches link. When you click on that, it shows you a snapshot of daily search trends or real-time search trends for your selected region. Daily search trends tell you exactly what people are searching for each day, and you can click "load more" to see previous days.
Scraping Trending Searches: why and how
Google Trends is an incredible resource for understanding what real people search for and how the popularity of topics changes over time. Trending Searches gives you the chance to track interest, sentiment, gain demographic insights, and understand what topics are rising and falling in popularity. This kind of data can help you in lots of interesting ways:
- Keeping an eye on your competitors and their brands, or monitoring interest in your own brand
- Determining what products are likely to be popular in the near future
- Getting ahead with real estate investment by tracking interest in up and coming neighborhoods
- Researching topics for journalism or academic papers
- Finding niche markets that might let you profit from viral spikes or seasonal trends
If your business depends on the popularity of certain search terms, tracking them on Google Trending Searches will give you insights that could mean a big difference to your margins.
You can try to do this manually, but Google has set quotas and limits on the number of searches that can be run from a single IP address or device. Google is still vague on the actual limits, but you'll probably find yourself getting restricted after a relatively small number of queries. This is okay if you just want to play around with Google Trends, but what if you want to regularly extract large amounts of Trending Searches data?
Is there a Google Trends API?
If you go looking for a Google Trends API or Google Trending Searches API, you're out of luck. There is no official API to help you get data from Google Trends and use it in other applications.
But luckily web scraping is there to help you get the data you need.
Scraping Google Trending Searches means that you don't need to worry about Google's arbitrary limits on your queries. And you can also do a lot more with the data you extract because it will arrive in a structured format that's perfect for immediately plugging into spreadsheets, tools, reports, or applications.
Can I use AI to scrape Google Trends?
AI is currently unable to scrape websites directly, but it can help generate code for scraping Google Trends if you prompt it with the target elements you want to scrape. Note that the code may not be functional, and website structure and design changes may impact the targeted elements and attributes.
Is it legal to scrape Google Trends?
There is no need to log in or go through any privacy authorization to access Google Trends. It is therefore publicly available and scraping it is legal. But there are still some regulations that need to be considered, such as the European GDPR or the Californian CCPA, that protect personal data. Read more about these regulations at our legality post.
Step-by-step guide to scraping Google Trending Searches
You can use our Google Trending Searches Scraper to scrape Google Trending Searches without worrying about limitations and quotas. It's a free, ready-made tool on the Apify platform and you can use it together with our Google Trends Scraper to get the most out of Google Trends.
1. First, go to the Actor's page on Apify Store, which is packed with free, ready-to-use web scraping and automation tools called Actors, and click the Try for free button. You will be redirected to Apify Console, which is your workspace to run tasks for your scrapers. If you already have an Apify account and are logged in, go to Step 3.
2. Log in or sign up using your email account, Google, or GitHub.
3. Next we'll fill in the input parameters:
- First, select a country
Then choose one of the four different output modes:
- Complete: this scrapes everything, along with nested articles (note that this is not Excel or CSV friendly)
- Queries: this scrapes only queries, related queries, and traffic information (this is Excel or CSV friendly)
- Related queries only: this is a stripped-down version of queries that only scrapes related queries
- Articles: just returns one article per dataset item
Then fill in the final few fields:
- Choose your from and to dates to set the range
- Decide on the maximum number of results
Now click on the Start button to start the Actor.
4. Your task will change status to show that it is Running. The scraper is now scraping Google Trends and extracting your data. As soon as you see that the status has changed to Succeeded, click on the Dataset tab to check your scraped search results.
5. The Dataset tab contains your data in lots of versatile formats, including HTML table, JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS feed. You can open them by clicking on View in another tab, Preview or Download. You can then share the data, or upload it anywhere you like. Use it in spreadsheets, other programs or apps, or your own projects.
If you liked this tool, you might be interested in our range of other useful SEO tools in Apify Store:
And you can also read more about these and other SEO tools in 5 powerful scrapers to add to your SEO tool kit.
