If you've been searching for a Google Trends API, you've likely hit a wall. Google doesn't offer an official API for Google Trends. However, you can still access the data by either...
2. Adapting an open-source library, or
3. Building a solution yourself
In this article, we’ll compare the top options for each approach.
Third-party APIs
There are many third-party APIs that offer plug and play access to Google Trends data. Each varies in its accuracy, reliability, and feature set, and none are officially endorsed by Google.
We’ll compare three popular options: Glimpse, Zenserp, and SerpWow.
Quick comparison
*Does it show a keyword’s growth over different periods, such as yearly / quarterly / monthly?
1. Glimpse
Glimpse offers an enterprise API solution for Google Trends data. It provides the most reliable and accurate data along with additional insights like absolute search volume, and forecasts.
While it's the most costly of the APIs, 38% of the Fortune 50 use it given its reliability and accuracy
2. Zenserp
Zenserp is the most affordable option among the three. However, it's also the least reliable, making it suitable for users with simplistic needs and a very limited budget.
3. SerpWow
SerpWow strikes a balance between Glimpse and Zenserp. Starting at $120 per month, it offers decent reliability at a price point between the other two options.
Alternative solutions
If you don’t want to use a third-party API, you can build your own by either adapting open-source API libraries or building your own solution from scratch.
These options are only recommended if you have significant technical expertise or an in-house team that is prepared to dedicate serious time and effort.
Additionally, they have a number of risks and limitations:
Instability: Changes to Google's website can break these tools without warning, so they require frequent updates and maintenance.
Inaccuracy: When it suspects automated data collection, Google Trends intentionally returns inaccurate data, which most tools then return as if it were accurate.
Rate limits: Google applies heavy rate limits, restricting the amount of data you can pull.
Lack of support: Unofficial APIs often have poor documentation and no official support.
No absolute search volume: Don't provide absolute search volume data, which means you still don't know how many searches there were for a keyword.
No trend discovery: Only allow you to make specific keyword calls, therefore to discover unknown trending keywords.
Here's a complete breakdown of the pros and cons.
| Technical expertise needed | Cost | Accuracy & reliability | Rate-limit | Simple integration? |
Third-party | Low | High | Best | High | |
Open-source | Medium | Medium | Poor | Low | |
Custom | High | Low | Depends | Depends |
Open-source APIs
Popular open-source options for accessing Google Trends data:
PyTrends
Provides: Requests to Google Trends and parsing of the returned data.
Supports: Interest over time, interest by region, related topics, and related queries.
Language: Python.
gtrendsR
Provides: similar functionality to PyTrends, with functions to interact with Google Trends data directly from R.
Supports: Trends (number of hits), time series data, geographic data, and related queries.
Language: R.
google-trends-api
Provides: Promise-based interface for fetching Google Trends data and is intended to be used in Node.js.
Supports: Interest over time, interest by region, related topics, and related queries.
Language: JavaScript.
Custom build
Some developers choose to skip the existing open-source APIs and build custom apps to pull data directly from the Google Trends website. Popular libraries for doing this include Beautiful Soup and Scrapy for Python, and Puppeteer for JavaScript (Node.js).
Pros:
Offers more control over data extraction.
Can be customized for specific needs.
Cons:
Requires even more time and effort to implement and maintain.
Prone to breaking with website structure changes.