Relative search interest, monthly pull, five years of history

Google Trends

The shape of interest over time: when a term rose, when it peaked, where it is searched most.

Run by: Google
Since: 2006
Refreshed: Monthly pull, five years of history

Google Trends reports how interest in a search term has moved over time, scaled from 0 to 100 against the peak in the window you ask for. It also reports interest by country and the queries rising alongside the one you asked about.

I read it through SerpApi so the pull is repeatable, and store the series rather than a screenshot, which is what lets the chart on each category's search-trend page go back five years.

Why it can be relied on

It is drawn from Google's own search logs, the largest sample of search behaviour that exists.
The five-year view is long enough to show whether a category is a news spike or a durable habit, which is the question that matters most in a field this young.
Interest by country is a genuinely independent check on where demand sits, separate from the traffic estimates.

What is taken from it

Each category's trend: Five years of interest in the category's own search (for example “ai girlfriend” or “ai image editor”), worldwide and in the United States, on its search-trend page.
Interest by country: Which countries search the term hardest, shown against the volume figures.
Rising queries: What is climbing next to the term, which is usually a news story or a new brand. Unrelated rising searches are shown as Google reports them and are not read as demand for the category.

What it cannot tell me

The scale is relative. A score of 100 means the peak of that window, not a number of people, so Trends can never tell you how big something is.
It is sampled, and small terms are noisy or empty.
Terms that share a name with something else are contaminated. I check for that and say when a trend line is not really about the category.

Where it appears on this site

Cited as Google Trends, with the month it covers, on every category’s statistics pages where it applies. In the AI girlfriend section, for example:

The source itself

This is the only page on the site that links out to Google Trends. Everywhere else, a citation links here instead, so the context travels with the number.

Visit trends.google.com

The other data sources

Written by Miles Foster, Owner and tester, RankDude. RankDude is not affiliated with Google Trends. How tested platforms are graded is on the methodology page; the data in use is on the AI girlfriend statistics pages.