Google Trends still has no open API a year after the alpha announcement

What happened

Google announced an alpha for a Trends API in July 2025. As of late August 2026, roughly thirteen months later, access is still gated behind an application process — at least for the developer who wrote about the experience on dev.to. They say they applied, waited, and never heard back, which pushed them to piece together their own ways of getting trends data into pipelines and spreadsheets.

The official route is still worth a try

According to the post, applying for the alpha remains the sensible first move. An official endpoint beats a scraped one on stability, and if an application is accepted and the quotas fit the use case, there is no reason to look further. The author's application, however, did not go through.

Paid alternatives

Commercial SERP API providers — the post names DataForSEO and SerpAPI — expose Trends endpoints, and by the author's account they work. The catch is price: plans start around $50 to $75 a month, which the author calls a strange amount to pay for a workload like checking thirty keywords once a week. For enterprise-scale volume, they concede, that subscription is simply the answer.

A scraper with opinions

For smaller workloads, the author built "Google Trends Explorer", an actor on the Apify platform. You pass in keywords, a region and a time range, and it returns one JSON item per keyword. The output includes an interest-over-time series and related queries split into "top" and "rising", plus three summary fields: the latest value, the average value, and the date of the peak week.

Those summary fields exist, the author explains, because half the time they are all anyone actually wanted — feeding a 54-point series to a language model just to be told that interest peaked in May is a waste of tokens.

Reading trends data responsibly

The post closes with caveats that apply to any source of Trends data, official or otherwise:

• The values are Google's sampled, relative 0-100 index, scoped to whatever region and time range was selected. Run the same query twice and small numbers can wiggle.
• The index is a signal for whether a topic is growing or dying, not a measurement.
• Google rate-limits these endpoints aggressively. The Apify actor rotates proxy sessions and backs off on 429 responses.

One design decision stands out: if every keyword in a run fails, the run exits with a FAILED status instead of returning an empty array. The author says they have been burned by scrapers that quietly report success with no data, leaving a "data pipeline" shipping nothing for three weeks before anyone notices.

The author also discloses that they build and maintain the tool with AI assistance, on their own account, that it only touches public aggregate data, and that they will switch to the official API the moment it goes generally available with sane quotas.

Why it matters

Trends data underpins SEO work, market research, content planning and, increasingly, LLM-driven pipelines. A year after announcing an API, Google has left small-scale users with two imperfect options: pay SERP vendors a monthly fee for light workloads, or run scrapers that are fragile, rate-limited and prone to failing silently. The post is a useful snapshot of that gap — and a practical reminder that when you do scrape, loud failures beat quiet empty results, and summarised data beats raw series when the consumer only needs the headline.