Whenever you need keyword or topic ideas for content marketing, you'll find Google Trends to be one of the best options.
Google is at the forefront of human knowledge, monitoring published information in real time, and can monitor nearly any topic, tracking its changes over time or sudden spikes in interest.
Therefore, following Google Trends is a great way to quickly gain a lot of short-term traffic and links.
Unfortunately, for those of us who work in content marketing, there is no real way to effectively monitor and extract information from Google Trends quickly and widely. They have daily and real-time trend pages for the entire country, but there is no way to monitor all of them, no way to download or export bulk data as CSV, and no way to consistently get repeated customized data across a variety of terms without manually going in and searching for each term, downloading each CSV, and manually compiling all the data.
Needless to say, this is a pretty big hassle.
So, how do you scrape data from Google Trends and use it effectively? This blog will introduce 5 ways to build your Google trends scraper.
Method 1. Use a Scraping Browser
Google Trends does not provide an official API. If it did, it would make everything much easier.
Some people think it's for privacy reasons; others think it's to protect their proprietary monitoring code. I guess Google Trends API may be in Google's feature plan, but they may not be willing to provide it for free.
It doesn't matter! We can use a powerful third-party scraping browser to scrape Google Trends. Scraping Browser can easily bypass robot detection and achieve data crawling of Google Trends. Scrapeless Scraping Browser is one of the most powerful Google Trends scraping tools in 2025.
Why choose Scrapeless?
With Scrapeless, you can easily access and scrape Google Trends data without writing or maintaining complex scraping scripts. Simply call the code we provide to quickly extract all the Google Trends Data you need.
How to scrape Google Trends data using Scrapeless scraping browser?
Prerequisites
- Node.js: Version 14 or higher.
- npm: Node package manager.
- Scrapeless Browserless Service: Use the browser service provided by Scrapeless
Getting an API Key
Go to the Scraping Browser dashboard and get your API key from the Settings tab. It's an essential parameter to finish scraping.
Installation
- Install dependencies
npm install
Configuration
Step 1. Environment variables: Create a .env
file in the project root and add your API key:
API_KEY=your_scrapeless_api_key
Step 2. Script configuration: The script is pre-configured to get the trends for "youtube" and "twitter" in the United States over the past 7 days. We need to customize:
- Change keywords: Modify the q parameter in the QUERY_PARAMS variable.
- Change geolocation: Update the geo parameter.
- Adjust date range: Change the date parameter as needed.
Step 3. Set cookies: To ensure that your data about interests changing over time is displayed stably. You need to set cookies through puppeteer before visiting the website:
const cookies = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('./data/cookies.json', 'utf-8'));await browser.setCookie(...cookies);
Now you need to access the cookies here in your browser and log in to https://trends.google.com to export cookies.json. If you don't know how to export cookies, you can try using this browser extension to export cookies in json format.
Usage
Run the script using Node.js:
node index.js
Script working steps:
- The script connects to the remote browser
- Navigates to Google Trends with specified parameters by setting cookies via puppeteer.
- Extracts trend data and logs it to the console.
- Saves a screenshot of the trends page as
trends.png
and updates the cookie. - Handles any rate limiting by reloading the page if a 429 error is encountered.
- Get the result data: result.json.
Method 2. Writing a crawler using ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence is a very controversial topic right now. I tend to think "it's not good for content production", but it definitely has its uses. One of them is coding.
In fact, ChatGPT is built on Python, and it uses almost all GitHub and StackExchange sites as part of its training model. As a result, it generally does well on things that need to be specific, accurate, and technical, like programming work.
Of course, it's not perfect. ChatGPT doesn't actually have its own development environment, and it can't do things like "write runnable code" or "make sure the code is as good as possible."
Let's see what GPT told me:
from pytrends.request import TrendReq
import pandas as pd
# Initialize pytrends
pytrends = TrendReq(hl='en-US', tz=360)
# Set up the keyword you want to track
keyword = 'Python Programming'
# Build the payload for the keyword
pytrends.build_payload([keyword], cat=0, timeframe='now 7-d', geo='', gprop='')
# Get interest over time
data = pytrends.interest_over_time()
# Display the data
print(data)
# Save the data to a CSV file
data.to_csv('google_trends_data.csv')
# Get related queries
related_queries = pytrends.related_queries()
print(related_queries[keyword]['top'])
# Get real-time trending searches in the US
trending_searches = pytrends.trending_searches(pn='united_states')
print(trending_searches.head())
However, ChatGPT can't tell fact from fiction, so it may give you an inaccurate degree or code. That's okay, that's not the point.
Just know that you can have ChatGPT write a scraper for Google Trends, and it will create the code for you. Then you need to troubleshoot that code, make sure you understand what it does and where it comes from, and fix the problems it creates. It does save you a lot of time and effort after all.
Method 3. Using the Pytrends library
Pytrends is finally here!
Pytrends is a Python-based Google Trends scraper and API converter. It is by far the largest, most popular, and best-maintained Google Trends API service.
It is very easy to install it completely, then just format your requests to get the data you need, set up a proxy list to handle your scraping, and then use the data.
However, you have to abide by Google's restrictions on scraping. This means you have to bypass blocks, add latency, and generally mimic human behavior. This can be difficult to set up and may require trial and error.
Stop shouting at anti-bot detection!
Scrapeless Web Unlocker helps a lot to avoid getting blocked and CAPTCHA verification!
Try for Free Now!
Method 4. Python Google Trends Scraper
You can also choose to build your own custom solution using Python. However, building a Google Trends crawler entirely in Python requires comprehensive considerations to avoid being directly detected by Google's anti-bots and causing your work to be greatly hindered.
We have explained in detail the steps of scraping Google Trends using Python in previous articles. Please read carefully to provide you with the most comprehensive help.
Further Considerations
Is scraping Google Trends legal?
It is not illegal, but it is against policy. However, you may not collect legally protected private information from Google Trends.
Technically, "automated access" violates Google's Terms of Use. Using a scraper, robot, or API to access Google Trends (or any other Google page) data is technically a violation of the Terms of Service.
Google will not usually take action against you specifically. However, they will monitor your behavior, and if you violate rate limits or try to bypass access restrictions, they can limit or ban your IP address from accessing Google Trends data.
Do you need a proxy to scrape Google Trends?
Yes. In fact, you usually need a list of proxies to rotate. The more requests from a given IP address in a short period of time, the more likely Google will temporarily or permanently block those IP addresses.
It is recommended that you use smart residential proxies that can rotate. They can largely avoid rate limits caused by a single IP.
Scrapeless provides premium global clean IP proxy services, specializing in dynamic residential IPv4 proxies. With over 70 million IPs in 195 countries, the Scrapeless residential proxy network offers comprehensive global proxy support to drive your business growth.
The Bottom Lines
4 effective methods in this blog can help you build a powerful Google Trends Scraper. All you need to remember are:
- Don't scrape any private data!
- Import the way to bypass anti-bot detection.
- Find a suitable rotating proxy.
Scrapeless Google Trends API integrates with CAPTCHA solver, Web Unlocker, and intelligent rotating proxies, which can help easily scrape Google Trends data and provide a seamless scraping experience.
Top comments (0)