Unlock the Value of Google Trends Data With Web Scraping in '24

Google Trends is an excellent data source for e-commerce businesses and website owners. It enables businesses to 

• Identify trends in their industry. 
• Monitor their competitors. 
• Optimize SEO and content marketing strategy. 
• Identify their niche market.
• Understand customers’ behaviors and expectations.

Aside from the benefits of Google Trends data, extracting data manually is time-consuming. Web scraping enables e-commerce businesses to automatically collect Google Trends data in a structured format.

In this guide, we will explain how web scraping bots extract data from Google Trends step by step. In addition, we will provide you with the top 5 web scraping use cases in Google Trends, along with tips and business outcomes.

What is Google Trends data?

Google Trends is a free analytics tool displaying trending searches and keyword popularity. It provides anonymized and categorized datasets to make data easier to understand and use. It allows users to access real-time (data from the last 7 days) and non-real time (data from 2004 to the last 72 hours).

Is it legal to scrape Google Trends?

It is legal to scrape publicly available web data. However, data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA make it illegal to scrape personally identifiable information (PII). Scraping publicly available Google data is not illegal unless your scraping activities do not harm the website or you use scraped data for any harmful purpose.

How to scrape Google Trends data?

1. Identify your search term or topic. 
2. Select your geographical location (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Country-Region dropdown menu in Google Trends

3. Search for the term or topic you identified (see Figure 2). 

Figure 2: Two search functions of Google Trends for the same search term

4. Google Trends will provide a chart displaying interest in your specific term over the past 12 months. The highest point on the chart represents the peak popularity for the web scraping search (see Figure 3). 

Figure 3: Search interest for web scraping over the given time.

5. Enter the exact search term into your Google Trends scraper. 
6. Select the time range for the keyword (i.e., past 12 months). 
7. Choose your geographical location. 
8. Run the scraper to get the dataset from Google Trends 
9. Download the scraped data in the format of your choice.

Sponsored

Bright Data’s Google Trends Scraper API automatically collects public data from Google Trends. It scrapes Google Trends data, such as 

• Search terms and topics,
• Latest stories & insights,
• Recently trending.

5 ways to make the most of Google Trends data using web scraping

1. Target Competitive Keywords

You can use Google Trends to learn about the search volume for your target keywords and the most popular related topics. It enables users to conduct multiple searches simultaneously (see Figure 4). You can compare a couple of search terms based on their search interest at a given time and location.  

In the following example, Google Trends displays the search interest for the terms “proxy server” and “VPN” in the United States over the last 12 months. There is no clear downward or upward for these keywords over the past 12 months. However, it does not show the exact amount of traffic. If you observe a downward trend in your target keyword, you can focus on keywords that are trending upward.

Figure 4: Comparison of two keywords’ popularity.

2. An easier way to conduct niche market research

You can extract trending terms and topics from Google Trends by a specific country, subregion, or city. For example, you are a local business owner and want to search for top trending keywords in the gaming industry for your website content. Assume that the majority of your customers are in Germany. You must select Germany as your geolocation. Google Trends provides a chart with ups and downs for the search term “gaming headsets” (see Figure5). Below the chart, you can see which subregions your keyword is popular. It enables businesses to better understand which search terms are trending in their areas and reach their target customers easier.

Figure 5: Search interest in gaming headsets over the specified time period.

3. Understand market trends on Google Shopping

Google Shopping allows customers to browse products from various sellers who featured their products on it (see Figure 6). 85% of all product searches are conducted on Amazon and Google. It is a great source for retailers to analyze competitors. Google Trends enables businesses to understand which products are trending up or down on Google Shopping at any given time and location.  

Figure 6:  Google service that enables customers to search for products on online.

When we search for wireless headphones on Google Shopping, Google Trends shows us wireless headphones interest in the United States over the last 12 months ( see Figure 7). If you scroll down the page, you can see in which locations the wireless headphones term is most popular. 

A quick recommendation: When you enter a term or topic into the search bar, you will see wireless headphones (search term) and wireless headphones (topic) appear in the dropdown menu. The search term only focuses on the actual search term and provides more focused results, whereas the topic covers related queries and terms and provides more comprehensive results. 

Figure 7: Example of Google Trends data concerning wireless headphones.

Assume you have added a product to Google Shopping, say a computer mouse, and want to analyze customer preferences and industry trends. I searched for a computer mouse on Google Trends to see dominant keywords in the industry and which products have the most traffic. You can see the rising keywords related to your search term in the related queries section. Glass mouse skate is the most popular search term for a computer mouse on Google Shopping (see Figure 8). Search terms labeled with breakout mean it grew by more than 5000%.

Figure 8: Example of related queries concerning computer mouse.

It provides information about customer preferences and needs. We can see that customers are interested in ergonomic mouse and wireless mouse (see Figure 9). You can see which areas in the United States are most interested in the computer mouse term .

Figure 9: Example of top rising keywords concerning computer mouse.

 4. Use your competitive keywords on YouTube to reach target customers 

Youtube is the 2nd most visited website in the world behind Google for September 2022. Youtube marketing helps businesses inform their potential customers about their products and services. A well-targeted Youtube content will empower your target audience in the purchase decision process. You can use Google Trends to understand the most popular topics in your industry and what searches your target audience makes. 

Assume you provide web scraping services and want to create video content that answers the questions of your target audience. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using scraped Google Trends data for YouTube marketing:

1. Search for the web scraping term and select “web scraping – search term” to get the most focused results (see Figure 10). 

Figure 10: Google Trends search results for the query “web scraping.”

2. Choose geolocation and a time range. 
3. Change the search property, switch from the web search to YouTube search. 
4. Check the top and rising queries to see what people are looking for with the keyword you entered. Top keywords show the most commonly searched terms in the United States when using web scraping. Rising searches are terms that have the most significant growth within the given period. Your competitive keywords are what is web scraping, web scraping with r, selenium web scraping, etc. (see Figure 11).

Figure 11:  Rising queries for web scraping term.

5. Monitor your competitors’ popularity 

• Determine the leading brands in your industry: Let’s look at the competition between Netflix, HBO, and Hulu.
• Determine the target locations: Let’s go with the United States. We want to see the search interest for the terms we entered in the given region.
• Choose a time frame: In our case, we’d like to see the search interest over the past five years.

We can see that HBO Max and Hulu are performing almost at the same level after 2020. Netflix has clear upward trends at certain times. We can also see that it has been stable since 2021 (see Figure 12). 

Figure 12: Comparison of the popularity of multiple brands in the same industry.

How to Get Google Trends comparison data

1. Select the time range. 
2. Choose geo-location. 
3. Enter each search term that you would like to compare. 
4. Run the scraper to get the required data from Google Trends. 
5. You can save scraped data in the desired format, including CSV, Excel, and JSON. 

You can schedule scraping time. For instance, if you want to extract data regularly, say at the beginning of each month, set the web scraper to extract data on a monthly basis. The bot will run at the time you specify.

Further Reading

If you want to learn more about web scraping and how it can benefit your business, feel free to read our articles on the topic:

• Web Scraping tools: Data-driven Benchmarking
• The Ultimate Review Scraping Guide: How-To & Best Practices
• Email scraping: overview, use cases, challenges & best practices

Also, feel free to check our data-driven list of web scrapers

If you have any further questions about how to get data from Google Trends, you can reach us: