Google Trends Explore API Adds Category-Only Filtering

The Google Trends Keyword Data API now supports trend analysis by category without requiring a keyword.

What’s new

Following Google Trends’ introduction of category filters on the new Explore page, we updated the keywords and category_code parameters in the Google Trends Explore API for both Task POST and Live endpoints.

How it works

The keywords field is now required only if you don’t specify category_code. Similarly, category_code is required if you don’t specify keywords. When making a category-only request, its value must be greater than 0. If you specify keywords but omit category_code, the 0 value is applied by default, and the search is performed across all available categories.

To get the list of supported categories and their corresponding category_code values, use the Google Trends Categories endpoint.

Why it matters

In short, this means you can now use category_code in DataForSEO API on its own to explore trends within a specific topic or industry. You can also combine a category with keywords to narrow trend data to a more relevant context.

This update gives you three ways to analyze Google Trends data:

• specify keywords without category_code to search across all available categories;
• specify both keywords and category_code to analyze a keyword trend within a particular category;
• specify category_code without keywords to explore popularity trends for an entire category.

With category-only filtering, you can go beyond analyzing individual keywords and explore the popularity of broader topics and industries and build category-level trend discovery and monitoring workflows.

Check out the updated Google Trends Explore documentation to start.