How to use Google Trends for YouTube trend spotting in 2025
Google Trends for YouTube is one of the most powerful tools YouTube creators have in their arsenal — since it’s one of the only sources of data that Google provides about YouTube searches (a.k.a.
Best of all, as of 2025, Google Trends for YouTube is 100% free!
If you haven’t learned how to leverage its powers to the fullest yet, we strongly encourage you to at least scan the contents of this article. If these tips help you discover even one big YouTube trend within your niche, it will be well worth your time.
No matter what, you’ll leave with a much better understanding of how to find both
How to use Google Trends for YouTube
- Open
Google Trends and enter the search term you want to research. - Click “Web”, then change the filter to “YouTube”.
- Click “Past 12 months”, then select the desired time period.
- Optionally click “Worldwide”, then select a specific country.
- Use browser extensions to reveal search volume & competition.
1. Open Google Trends
Fortunately for YouTube creators like us, Google generously provides highly-accurate data about search trends for both Google Search &
YouTube through
2. Filter to YouTube trends
By default, Google Trends will show the search trend for that term within Google Search (Web). For our purposes, we want to view the search trends for YouTube instead. To do so, change the filter that says “Web” to “YouTube”.
The data you are looking at now is sourced directly from what people are typing into the YouTube search bar, so there’s no better place to uncover insights about your niche and your audience.
3. Select a time period
Next, you should consider what time frame you are interested in. The longer the time frame you select, the less granular the data will be (hourly → daily → weekly). Google Trends allows you to see hourly data up to 7 days, daily data up to the last 90 days, and weekly data up to the last 5 years.
That means we can see how search interest for any search term has changed for up to 5 previous years! Let’s just take a moment and be grateful that Google has chosen to provide this invaluable data to all of us totally free of charge!
As far as the time period we recommend using for your YouTube trend research, it depends a lot on the nature of your channel and your niche.
The last 12 months of data provides a nice snapshot of how the search term has been trending recently. However, it’s important to note that the 12 month view will obscure trends that are due primarily to seasonality. For this reason, if you expect the terms you’re interested in to have any substantial seasonality (for example, “holiday gifts”), you should look at least the last two or three years of data.
Each different time period comes with tradeoffs, so just try to use the one that best meets your channel’s specific needs.
For example, a gaming channel might be most interested in YouTube gaming trends in the last 90 days, while a channel with highly-seasonal content (think, snowboarding channel) might want to look at how the seasonal trend spikes have been changing over several years (e.g. is each spike higher than the last?)
We typically encourage the users of our
4. Select a location
YouTube is global, so we typically recommend looking at worldwide trends, but as was the case with time period, it depends on the nature of your channel and your target audience.
Worldwide trends can be quite different than the trends for a particular country, so if your YouTube channel’s audience is primarily centered in a specific country — say the USA or India — it can sometimes be more helpful to just focus on the trends for just that country.
Although Google Trends’ “Topics” are language agnostic (shows trends for the topic across all languages), the data for the search terms you enter is not. For example, if you research an English word in Google Trends with “Worldwide” selected as the location, you will be looking at the trend for that search for all people that have entered that specific term in English into YouTube’s search bar.
Typically, if someone is entering an English search term, then they will be more than happy to watch a video that’s in English — even if it’s from a creator in another country (just ask Netflix). So we generally recommend sticking with the “Worldwide” filter, since all of those searches in the same language will be potentially interested in your YouTube channel’s videos.
5. Reveal estimated search volume & competition
Although Google Trends shows us how a given YouTube search has been trending over time, they don’t give us any sense of what the search volume (# of searches per month) is.
To put this another way, in Google Trends, the trend chart for a keyword with 100 searches / month that has doubled over the last month, would look approximately the same as a keyword with 1 million searches / month that also doubled over the last month:
That’s obviously a major problem for YouTube creators, since we need to know that critical information in order to know which videos actually have demand and which don’t. And it’s even more important to have those insights when it comes to choosing a YouTube niche in the first place!
If you’re planning videos based on
Luckily ChannelStudio’s
Where to find YouTube trends
When you enter a search term into Google Trends for YouTube, it will show you how interest for that search on YouTube has been trending — but how do you figure out what search terms to enter in the first place?
YouTube trend source #1: Google Trends Trending Now
Google Trends has a
That said, the Trending Now tool can still be helpful for identifying general search trends — since many trending Google search queries will likely be trending on YouTube too.
Once you’ve found an interesting trending search in Trending Now, you can look it up in
YouTube trend source #2: YouTube Trending Page
Another place you can check to find trending searches on YouTube is
Rather than showing you a list of trending searches the way that Google Trends’ Trending Now tool does, YouTube’s Trending Page instead shows a collection of videos. However, YouTube creators typically use keywords prominently within their video titles, so it’s fairly easy to do a quick scan of the page to identify a few potentially interesting YouTube keywords to research further.
YouTube trend source #3: YouTube Studio Trends Tab
The
The keywords you see here are frequently-searched topics that YouTube has determined are relevant to your channel based on the previous videos you’ve created. The list of recommendations is typically fairly short, so although this is certainly one of the places you should periodically check, you’ll likely exhaust the keywords you discover here fairly quickly.
You can also uncover trending YouTube searches by entering a topic into the search bar at the top of the Trends Tab. You’ll only see a handful of results by default, so once again, click the Show all button to show additional keywords.
Notice that the displayed keywords are bucketed into High, Medium, and Low volume. Although this is better than nothing — seeing as some keywords can have anywhere from a thousand all the way up to many millions of searches — this info isn’t especially helpful.
Fortunately there are
YouTube trend source #4: YouTube trend databases
Although you’d likely uncover a handful of relevant YouTube search trends using the approaches above, you’ll need to work pretty hard to find them.
A far more effective approach is to simply pay for access to a premium
Plus, most platforms even provide estimated search volume and competition data for the keywords. It’s basically like having the Trending Now tool that Google Trends offers, but for YouTube specifically, and with detailed data!
Catching the right trend at the right time can instantly put your channel on the map, so these tools are worth every penny.
Use Google Trends to compare YouTube keywords
Google Trends for YouTube is very useful for researching individual keywords, but one of its most powerful features is the ability to compare multiple keywords.
When you enter two or more keywords into Google Trends for YouTube, the chart will display the relative difference in search volume between the two keywords.
For example, the chart below shows that “apples” has 10 times as many searches on YouTube as “pears”:
That means that you can
So if you had a list of 100 keywords you were considering, but weren’t sure how to prioritize them, you could theoretically compare them all in Google Trends for YouTube and create a highly-accurate estimate of their relative search volumes.
But doing it that way would take an incredibly long time!
Luckily that’s exactly how ChannelStudio’s
In fact,
If you haven’t done so already, we highly recommend comparing the search volume numbers that your current YouTube keyword tool is reporting to the ratio reported by Google Trends in order to assess whether or not the tool is accurate.
Then do the same thing with ChannelStudio, and see for yourself:
Explore YouTube search trends enriched with data
ChannelStudio’s free
With detailed data about what YouTube viewers are searching for, what videos would likely have demand, how keywords & tags are trending on YouTube, and what search terms will be easiest to rank for — you’ll be able to confidently guide your channel’s strategy.
Just enter a YouTube keyword you want to research, and ChannelStudio will show you key metrics like estimated monthly search volume (99% accurate), ranking difficulty score, and percent growth — as well as a beautiful trend chart, a list of related keywords, & collection of popular tags.
ChannelStudio was designed to make researching YouTube trends for your channel not just easy, but even fun!
But don’t take our word for it!