Google Trends is the best free signal for "is demand going up or down?". It is also painful to use at scale:
- the website compares at most 5 keywords at a time;
- every chart is scaled to its own peak (0–100), so you can't read growth off it directly;
- there is no official API, and scripts get rate-limited fast.
If you have a list of 200 product ideas, 500 SEO keywords or a spreadsheet of niches, you usually end up clicking through charts one by one and eyeballing them.
I wanted one row per keyword with a number that answers the question. So I built a small tool for it. This post explains the method, so you can reuse it even without my tool.
The method: compare the last 12 months with the 12 before
Raw Trends values are relative, but ratios inside the same series are meaningful. So for each keyword:
- Pull 5 years of weekly data for the country you care about.
- Take the last 52 complete weeks and the 52 weeks before them.
- Compare the averages: that's your year-over-year growth.
Comparing full years cancels out seasonality. "Sunscreen" in July vs January tells you nothing; this July-to-June year vs the previous one tells you whether the market is actually bigger.
Two extra signals help:
- 3-month momentum: the last 13 weeks vs the 13 weeks before. Is the growth still accelerating, or already cooling?
- Current vs peak: a keyword at 100% of its peak is a different story from one at 30%.
Then put everything into plain labels that anyone on the team can read:
| label | meaning |
|---|---|
emerging | no measurable searches a year ago, searches now |
breakout | +100% or more vs the previous 12 months |
rising | +20% to +100% |
stable | -20% to +20% |
declining | below -20% |
Real example (US, November 2026)
| keyword | trend | growth score | YoY change | 3-month momentum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| trump account | breakout | 83 | +466.8% | -22.5% |
| home battery backup | breakout | 62 | +122% | -46.3% |
| air fryer | stable | 52 | +14.3% | -11.4% |
How to read it:
- "home battery backup" more than doubled over a year, but momentum is down 46% over the last quarter. The demand is real, but the spike is behind it. That's useful before ordering stock or writing 20 articles on the topic.
- "air fryer" is a mature market: slightly up, flat overall. Big volume, no growth story.
- The growth score (0–100, 50 = flat) combines year-over-year growth and recent momentum into a single sortable number. Sort your list by it and the interesting keywords float to the top.
Bonus: why did it spike?
A number tells you that a keyword jumped, not why. So the tool can also look at news headlines from the weeks around each keyword's biggest spike and extract the phrases that keep coming up:
| keyword | phrases found in the news |
|---|---|
| trump account | accounts, kids, $1,000 |
| crowdstrike | outage, global, tech |
| spirit airlines | bankruptcy, files, chapter 11 |
I tested it on 50 well-known spikes in English, French and Arabic: it found the right cause in 43 of 50. Not perfect, but enough to separate a one-off news event from a lasting trend without opening 30 tabs.
Doing it in one call
The tool runs on Apify as Google Trends Growth Checker. Input:
{ "keywords": ["home battery backup", "portable power station", "heat pump rebate"], "countries": ["US", "GB"], "includeRelatedQueries": true, "explainWithNews": false } Up to 1,000 keywords per run, each one checked in every country you list. From Python:
from apify_client import ApifyClient client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN") run = client.actor("easydata-labs/keyword-growth-checker").call(run_input={ "keywords": ["home battery backup", "portable power station"], "countries": ["US"], }) for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items(): print(row["keyword"], row["trend"], row["growthScore"], row["yoyChangePct"]) Each row also includes the 10 fastest-rising related searches, which is often where the next keyword idea comes from, plus a lowVolumeWarning flag when Google has too little data for the number to be trusted.
It also works from n8n, Make, or an AI agent through Apify's MCP server: the agent gets a clean, labeled row instead of a raw chart to interpret.
Limits worth knowing
- Google Trends measures relative interest, not search volume. Use this to see whether demand is growing; use a search-volume tool to see how big it is.
- Very small keywords are noisy. Respect the low-volume flag.
- Growth is computed on complete weeks, so the current partial week is ignored on purpose.
Pricing
Pay per keyword: $12 per 1,000 keywords checked, and failed checks are not charged. The news explanation is optional and charged separately ($15 per 1,000), only when an explanation is actually found.
Disclosure: I built this tool. If you try it and something is off, or you need a field it doesn't have, leave a comment. I read them all.
