Google Trends

Written by Ilya Sudakov

Updated on Sep 30, 2026

Description

Google Trends is a free Google service that shows how search interest in a term or topic changes over time and across locations, based on a sample of searches made on Google and YouTube. Marketers, SEO specialists and researchers use it to compare the relative popularity of brands, products and topics.

Setup guide

Follow this setup guide to connect Google Trends to Improvado.

No account or credentials needed

Google Trends data is public. The connection asks only for the search terms or topics to compare, and each extraction carries its own location, time range, category and search property.

Click the Connections in the left navigation bar.
Categories on the Data sources page group all available platforms. Use a search to find the required one.

Click on the Google Trends tile.

In the Connection Name field, enter a name for this connection, for example the brand family you track. It is how the connection appears in Improvado. In the Comparison Groups field, enter the search terms to compare:

A comparison group holds up to 5 search terms or topic ids, separated by commas. Google Trends scales the terms of one group against each other.
Separate groups with a semicolon. Each group becomes one account.
A group can be at most 128 characters long.

For example, air wick, febreze, glade; nike, adidas creates two accounts: one compares three air freshener brands, the other two sportswear brands.

Track a topic instead of a search term

A topic covers all searches about one concept, including misspellings and other languages. To use one, open Google Trends, type the term and pick the topic from the suggestions. Copy the value after q= in the page address and enter it in the group. You can paste it as the address shows it: %2Fg%2F11c0xsp66x is saved as /g/11c0xsp66x.

Click Connect. After the connection completes successfully, the Google Trends connection appears in your Connected sources list. The groups of a connection cannot be changed later: to compare other terms, create another connection.

When the connection status is Active and the account status column shows one account per comparison group, you can move on to data extraction.

Choose what to compare. Every extraction carries its own settings:

Location - where the searches come from: United States (the default), Worldwide, or a code you type in: a country (DE), a country subdivision (US-TX) or a metro area (US-TX-623).
Time Range - Past 30 days, Past 90 days, Past 12 months (the default), Past 5 years, 2004 - present, or a custom range typed as YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM-DD that starts on 2004-01-01 or later. Google Trends returns daily points for the past 30 and 90 days, weekly points for the past 12 months and 5 years, and monthly points for 2004 - present. For a custom range, it picks the granularity from the length of the range.
Category - All categories (the default), or the Google Trends category to limit the searches to: the cat= value in the Google Trends page address after you choose a category, for example 71 for Food & Drink.
Search Property - the Google search the interest is measured on: Web Search (the default), Image search, News search, Google Shopping or YouTube search.

To extract data from the connected source, follow the instructions on how to set up data extraction.

Schema information

The schema information shows all report types you can use to extract data from Google Trends.

Limits

An index, not search volume. Values run from 0 to 100 against the group's highest point in the time range, and 0 means not enough data. In related queries, the top list is scored 0 to 100 and the rising list shows growth in percent, with Breakout above 5000%.

Comparable within one group only. Every group and time range is scaled on its own, so put the terms you want to compare in one group.

Each run replaces the data. Every extraction reloads the whole time range. For more history, choose a longer time range.

Sampled, about 2 days behind. Small shifts between runs are normal, and the latest period changes until it ends.

Public website data, no related topics. The connector reads the public Google Trends website, not an official Google API, so a change on the website can stop extraction until the connector is updated. Google does not return related topics to automated requests.

Attribution. Cite reused data as Data source: Google Trends, and not together with Google Ads data (Export, embed, and cite Trends data).

Release notes

Google does not publish release notes for Google Trends data. Google explains how the data is sampled and normalized in the FAQ about Google Trends data.

Was this article helpful?

Questions? The Improvado team is always happy to help. Send us an email, contact your Customer Success Manager, or raise a request in the Improvado Service Desk.