How does Google Trends work?
Google Trends analyzes a sample of Google search data to determine search interest over a specified time range and within set parameters (time and geography).
What do the numbers mean in Google Trends?
The numbers in Google Trends represent relative search popularity on a scale of 0 to 100. A higher number indicates greater interest in the search term. To see actual search volumes, you will need to use a tool like Glimpse, a free Chrome extension that enhances Google Trends with absolute search volume numbers.
How is Google Trends data adjusted?
Google Trends normalizes search volume data to a 0-100 index, with 100 representing a keyword's peak popularity. Learn how this normalized scale works in our full guide.
What does “breakout” mean in Google Trends?
"Breakout" in Google Trends means there’s a massive growth in search volume. It appears when a term goes from very low or no search volume to a significant number of searches in a short period – for example, if a term's searches jump from 0 to 10,000 in a month. Google uses this term because calculating the exact growth percentage, in these cases, would involve dividing by zero, which is mathematically undefined.
What does "rising" mean in Google Trends?
In Google Trends’ Related Queries and Related Topics section, “rising” means that there has been a recent significant interest in the search term or topic.
What does the search volume index mean in Google Trends?
The search volume index shows relative search popularity over time on a 0-100 scale, with 100 representing peak lifetime search volume for a term.
Is Google Trends free?
Yes, Google Trends is a free tool from Google that tracks the popularity of search queries over time and across regions. Glimpse is also free and enhances Google Trends with features like absolute search volume, trend alerts, seasonality analysis, forecasting, and more.
Can you see searches by demographic on Google Trends?
Currently, Google Trends doesn't allow filtering by age, gender, or specific demographics. However, you can see general search trends by geographic location. Under "Interest by region," you can analyze search popularity worldwide or by country, region, city, or metro area. Remember, these are relative rankings based on search activity per capita.
What is the dotted line in Google Trends?
The dotted line shows incomplete data, essentially Google's forecast for the next datapoint in the graph. For example, in a weekly graph, the last data point might be incomplete if the week hasn’t yet ended.
Why does Google Trends data change?
Google Trends data is continuously being updated, but what does it mean when you see historical data changing? This is because Google Trends uses a sample dataset (a subset of data representing the whole) rather than the entire dataset, a decision explained in their documentation. This leads to faster loading times and keeps their costs down.
But this also means that sometimes, when you revisit a keyword’s Google Trends graph, or even refresh the page, the data may look very slightly different. This difference – and variance in general – is more visible with lower volume search queries (see the Law of Large Numbers).
Below we’ve refreshed the data and overlaid it onto the original timeline to highlight how variance, even on the same keyword, scales with volume:
High-Volume Keyword
Medium-Volume Keyword
Low-Volume Keyword
Practically speaking though, there isn’t much cause for concern. The differences between the data is generally in line with how statistically significant those signals would be. For example, with the low volume keyword chart above, even though the data is drastically different, this data is coming from only a few dozen searches so with such a small sample size, we should never read too much into it.
What time zone is Google Trends in?
Google Trends displays data based on your local time zone. For example, if a US presidential candidate announces their candidacy at 2pm EST (Eastern Time, US) and there’s a spike in searches, viewers in Paris and New York will both see the same graph, but New York’s spike will say “2pm” and Paris’ spike will say “8pm.”
How to see Google Trends data before 2004
You can’t – Google Trends data isn’t available before 2004, as it was started that year. While Google search existed earlier, Google Trends only started collecting and analyzing search data from 2004 onwards. However, Google has another tool called Google Ngram, which shows the popularity of any keyword in books over the past 200+ years. It's like Google Trends but instead of looking at searches, it looks at books.
Does Google Trends include YouTube searches?
By default, Google Trends shows search activity of searches made using Google’s main search engine. This is called “Web Search” in Google Trends. However, to separately see activity of searches on YouTube, you can switch this to "YouTube Search" in the dropdown shown below. You can do also look at Google News, Google Images, and Google Shopping.
How to see weekly data in Google Trends
To see weekly data, select any of these timeframes:
Past 12 months
Past 5 years
Custom time range: any period of time between 9 months and 5 years
How to see daily data in Google Trends
To see daily data in Google Trends, select any of these timeframes:
Past 7 days
Past 30 days
Past 90 days
Custom time range: any period of 269 days or less.
How to see hourly data in Google Trends
To see hourly data, choose any of these timeframes from the dropdown:
Past 4 hours
Past day
Past 7 days
Note that hourly data is only available for the most recent 7-day period. Historical hourly data is not available beyond that cutoff.
How does Google Trends determine the location a search is made from?
Every time a Google search is made, Google stores the IP address of the searcher and IP addresses can be roughly correlated to a geolocation. This is the same data Google Trends uses when breaking down searches by different regions.
When was Google Trends created?
Google Trends was launched on May 10th, 2006 with this press release. It evolved from an earlier tool called Google Zeitgeist, which was introduced in 2001 to summarize annual search trends. Google Trends expanded on this concept by allowing users to explore patterns in search data over time and across various regions.