Top 7 Google Trends Alternatives

Every business that wants to stay relevant has to put a lot of effort into researching what people search for on the web. It’s a way to discover what users are interested in at the moment, how their search trends change over time, and which topics have the potential to drive traffic and engagement in the future. Google Trends remains the most popular tool for this purpose, but it’s not the only option available. There are Google Trends alternatives that offer similar features, plus something that may fit your needs even better.

More and more businesses and content creators are exploring these options as they outgrow what Google Trends can offer on its own. And with digital competition growing, alternative tools are filling in the gaps by offering some new, interesting features.

In this post, the team behind Heroic Rankings brings you the top 7 best Google Trends alternatives. We look at what it is that separates them from Google’s native tool and what they can bring to your business that’ll help you spot trending ideas with ease.

Google Trends has been the most popular tool for tracking Google search patterns ever since it was first introduced. It offers users a quick and easy way to measure how much interest there is in specific keywords. The tool can be used to compare different keywords and discover event-triggered spikes in keyword search volume.

The platform doesn’t show exact search volume figures and instead presents the relative interest on a scale from 0 to 100, making it easy to quickly identify peaks in popularity. It’s also possible to filter the results by country, time, category, and search type. Additionally, you can look at image search, YouTube search, and news specifically.

Another important feature of Google Trends is its ability to highlight related topics and related queries. These sections allow users to see which search terms are rising alongside their primary keyword, including “breakout” queries that have been attracting a lot of attention recently. You can use the data it provides when coming up with new content ideas or looking for changes in user intent.

Despite its usefulness, Google Trends puts the emphasis on trend direction and doesn’t offer deep keyword analysis. This means it doesn't provide precise search volume numbers, keyword difficulty metrics, or competitive insights. Due to this limited effectiveness, businesses and other users often look for alternatives to Google Trends that provide more detailed data. They find the information they offer useful for their overall SEO efforts and long-term strategy decisions.

The tools in this section are premium platforms that require a paid subscription to use. While the investment is higher, they deliver the most comprehensive data and are best suited for businesses and teams that need advanced capabilities to build a more informed, results-driven content strategy.

Saying that Semrush is just an alternative to Google Trends would be an understatement, because it’s an entire intelligence operation for discovering trending SEO keywords and much more. It’s designed to fill in many gaps that data from Google Trends leaves out.

Besides offering insights into recent trends, it provides specific details including the volume for each keyword and related keywords you might also want to target. The entire process starts with just one usable keyword and you end up with a number of variations and ideas you can use in your content strategy. In addition to keyword data, Semrush provides valuable information such as search intent, competitive density, and cost per click, making it possible to understand how challenging it would be to target a specific keyword.

Another thing Semrush tells you is who’s competing for the keyword you’re researching and how difficult it would be to enter the race. You can see which exact keywords are driving traffic to their pages and how their rankings have changed over time. With this amount of information on your competitors' SEO efforts, you have a lot of data to work with and can create your strategy based on real market performance.

Semrush also has social media features that further expand its value beyond traditional SEO research. You can track audience, engagement, and post performance while also keeping an eye on your competitors’ pages. While some other tools also integrate social media sources and conduct brand monitoring and mention tracking, Semrush is the strongest tool available that can also double as a social listening platform.

The cost of using Semrush varies based on the plan you choose. The Pro plan, which is recommended for individuals or very small marketing teams, has a price of $139.95 per month to start. Users may pay a higher monthly fee for larger teams on the Guru or Business plan but those plans come with additional benefits. A free trial is also available, allowing you to test the platform before purchasing a plan.

Insider Intelligence, now powered by eMarketer and Business Insider, operates slightly differently from other tools on the market. Rather than being a searchable trend database, it operates as a subscription-based research and insights hub that delivers daily trend reports across a wide range of industries. It covers numerous sectors from retail to tech, helping businesses in all industries learn about emerging developments that may be beneficial for their operations.

One of the main advantages of Insider Intelligence is its comprehensive research capabilities. Through daily reports, you gain access to expert interviews, full reports, blog posts, data visualizations, and infographics. This information becomes extremely useful not only for determining current trends but also what may impact the industry in the months and years ahead.

Unlike most other tools, Insider Intelligence doesn’t focus on finding fresh trending keywords or keyword analysis. Think of it more as a curated intelligence platform that takes research, data, and expert commentary, and distills them into actionable insights your business can use immediately. While it offers a different type of data than what you can get on Google Trends, it can help your organization in a similar way, by giving you a clearer understanding of where your industry is headed.

Insider Intelligence’s pricing plans aren’t listed publicly and are tailored based on your team size and the type of research you need. To get exact pricing, you have to contact the sales team for a custom quote.

Not every business needs to commit to a premium subscription to get more out of their trend research. The tools below all offer free plans that you can start using right away. However, it's worth noting that "free" comes with limitations.

Most of these platforms restrict access to certain features, cap the number of searches or tracked keywords, or reserve their most detailed metrics for paid tiers. Still, their free versions provide significantly more depth than Google Trends alone, making them a solid starting point for businesses looking to upgrade their research without an immediate financial commitment.

Exploding Topics is a Google Trends alternative that doesn’t just let you know when trends become obvious and instead tries to discover them before they become mainstream. It aims at identifying trends at the 2% adoption mark, allowing you to get ahead of competitors and create content or products before demand peaks.

To identify these new opportunities, Exploding Topics analyzes large volumes of search queries, online discussions, and market signals across a number of platforms. Its system filters out short-lived topics and focuses on those that show consistent growing patterns. This makes it extremely useful for businesses when they’re looking to make strategic, long-term content decisions for visibility and growth.

A good example of how useful identifying new trends with Exploding Topics can be is that the platform highlighted emerging interest in the keyword “AI writing tool” as early as May 2020 when it still wasn’t a part of mainstream conversations. The same pattern can be seen with emerging physical products. The keyword “air fryers” was identified in 2019 before the product really took off.

Another important thing to mention about Exploding Topics is that it looks to make finding new trends as simple as possible. They’re organized into different categories (e.g. SaaS, health, finance, eCommerce) and all you have to do is to take a look at your specific sector. This gives you access to data such as growth graphs and additional context that helps you evaluate which trends gain enough traction and whether they’re worth being integrated into your content strategy. So, unlike with Google Trends, you can research new trends before you’d even know to research them.

Exploding Topics has a free version which is available to everyone, but only offers access to a limited number of trending topics. You can also opt for one of its paid plans and unlock its entire trend database with forecasting data and filtering features. Higher-tier plans are best suited for businesses and teams that need more trend discovery capabilities for their decision-making processes.

Users who need in-depth SEO data and more insights than Google Trends can offer can also explore Ahrefs. The platform has emerged as an extremely popular option in the industry due to its comprehensive keyword database, reliable backlink analysis, and powerful competitive research tools.

In contrast to Google Trends, which measures popularity only over time, Ahrefs provides real data including search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic potential, and estimated clicks to give its users the ability to measure not just the trend of popularity but also how competitive the keywords will be and what traffic can realistically be generated from them.

Ahrefs’ most well-known feature is its Keywords Explorer, which allows you to enter a single seed keyword and come up with thousands of variations, categorized by terms, questions, and phrases. Besides this, you also get historical search trends that tell you how interest has evolved over time.

In addition, Ahrefs has strong backlink analysis capabilities. You can analyze competitor domains to see which pages attract the most traffic, which keywords they rank for, and where their strongest backlinks come from. This level of competitive insight makes Ahrefs a strong Google Trends alternative for businesses focused on building long-term organic visibility and authority.

Ahrefs positions itself as a premium SEO platform and has several pricing tiers that start at around $29. They scale up through Lite, Standard, and Advanced plans, with each higher tier offering increasing limits for keyword tracking and other features. Ahrefs’ free SEO tools are also available with a basic keyword discovery tool being a part of the kit.

Treendly is another platform that offers far more than basic trend graphs and relative search interest. Through its use of trends that can be searched and filtered by industry, country or geographic region, and via its growth history, Treendly enables users to identify new potential opportunities before they become saturated.

Treendly also aggregates data in one location, so users don't have to sift through large volumes of raw data. By providing a template for presenting data based upon specific search criteria, Treendly allows users to make easier decisions based on data.

One unique feature is that users can search through a variety of database types based upon various criteria such as category, location or growth pattern. This allows users to easily locate new trend ideas specific to their niche market. For example, users can quickly identify the growth trends associated with any niche they wish to enter, and identify the long-tail keywords associated with the trend, and identify projected future growth.

An equally important feature of Treendly is that you can conduct detailed trend data analysis across Google, YouTube, and Amazon, to obtain an in-depth understanding of how search demand differs across search engines and online marketplaces; which is particularly valuable for e-commerce brands and digital marketers who need multi-channel visibility of their overall business activities.

Depending on your need for accessing data, you can choose between several pricing options, which start at around $99 per month with a limited toolkit. All higher tiers offer more advanced features. The free version offers access to unlimited trends but you can only monitor up to three.

Keyword Tool is designed to generate autocomplete suggestions from major search engines and platforms, including Google, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and Instagram. Instead of focusing on trend graphs, it pulls real search suggestions directly from autocomplete data. Since autocomplete predictions are based on what users frequently search for, they often reflect queries that are gaining popularity or already generating consistent interest.

The platform is particularly useful for discovering long-tail keywords. By entering a single seed term, users can generate hundreds or even thousands of variations tailored to a specific language and Google domain. This makes it valuable for businesses targeting different countries or niche audiences. Because the suggestions come from actual user behavior, they can reveal highly specific queries that may not always appear in traditional trend tools.

Keyword Tool also integrates insights from Google Trends by pulling ideas from the “related queries” and “related topics” sections. However, it goes a step further by attaching SEO-focused metrics such as cost per click and competition levels to each keyword. This combination of autocomplete data and actionable SEO metrics makes Keyword Tool a practical alternative for users who want more depth than Google Trends alone can provide, especially when building long-tail content strategies.

Keyword Tool comes with a free version which only allows you to generate keyword suggestions. To gain access to detailed SEO metrics you need one of its paid plans, which vary in prices depending on the platform you want to analyze. Higher tiers unlock expanded keyword data and broader platform coverage.

Similarweb is not really an authentic keyword tracking platform, and it’s better known for its competitor intelligence capabilities.  When looking at any website in detail, users will find metrics including estimated monthly traffic, engagement rate, rankings based on traffic, bounce rates and average page views. These metrics can help you see how competitors are attracting users and retaining them.

What makes Similarweb an alternative option for Google Trends users is that you can also see a full breakdown of traffic sources (e.g. searching, paid ads, social media, and directly) for each website. More importantly, you can also find keywords leading to the site and their rankings within the search engines and the countries this traffic originates from.

Additionally, Similarweb offers tools like competitive keyword research and keyword gap analysis, which highlight trending SEO keywords based on real user behavior and clicks, not just search volume estimates. This makes it useful for identifying valuable keywords that are gaining traction among your competitors’ audiences.

Overall, while Similarweb doesn’t focus as narrowly on trend graphs as Google Trends, it gives a broader picture of digital performance and rising interests that can inform your SEO and content strategy.

Similarweb can be used for free but like with most other tools, you have to make a switch to a paid plan to unlock all of the platform's capabilities. Pricing isn’t fully disclosed and works on a deal-per-deal basis, meaning that you have to contact its sales team to receive a custom quote.

Choosing the ideal platform out of our best Google Trends alternatives ultimately depends on how deep you want your data to go. Basic trend insights are good for coming up with ideas and strategies, but if you want sustainable growth, more detailed keyword metrics and competitor intelligence are a must.

By combining the use of Google Trends with another platform, your business will have more information to work with, meaning that validating opportunities with real data and acting early on emerging demand becomes much easier.

The more tools you use to analyze demand, competition, and user behavior, the clearer your strategic direction becomes. This data-driven approach not only reduces risk but also increases your chances of building long-term visibility and authority in your niche.