If you've used pytrends, you know the feeling: it works for five keywords, then Google answers 429 Too Many Requests and your notebook stalls. Google Trends has no official public API, and it rate-limits hard.

Here's the approach I use for batches of keywords and countries, where failures are retried from a different IP automatically.

What you can get per keyword

  • interest over time (any timeframe, from the past hour to 2004)
  • interest by region
  • related queries and topics (top and rising)

The code

I run a hosted scraper I maintain on Apify (Google Trends Scraper). Python client (pip install apify-client pandas):

from apify_client import ApifyClient import pandas as pd client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>") run = client.actor("fjordlabs/google-trends").call(run_input={ "keywords": ["chatgpt", "gemini", "claude", "copilot"], "geos": ["US", "GB", "DE"], "timeframe": "past_12_months", "proxy": {"useApifyProxy": True}, }) items = list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()) ok = [i for i in items if not i.get("error")] print(f"{len(ok)} of {len(items)} keyword/country pairs succeeded")

Each successful keyword × country is one row, and rows that fail come back with an error field. You aren't charged for those, so you can just re-run the failures.

Why reliability matters here

When I checked the Apify Store, the most-used Google Trends scraper had about 44% of its public runs in the last 30 days end failed, aborted or timed out. Trends scraping is mostly a rate-limit problem. The fix is boring: back off, rotate IPs, retry the failed keyword, and never bill for an empty result.

Ideas

  • Keyword research: compare seasonality of 100 candidate topics before writing.
  • Product demand: track brand vs competitor interest by country, monthly.
  • AI agents: the Actor is callable through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can ask "is X growing in Germany?" and get real data.

Pricing is $0.002 per keyword result, so 100 keywords in one country is $0.20.

Disclosure: I built and maintain this scraper. Feedback welcome. Links to Apify include my referral code.