Google Trends Now · No Start Fee

No start fee, and never charged for an empty pull. Google's trending searches for any country — rank, the traffic floor Google publishes, when each trend started, and the news stories behind it.

Built for a schedule. Most actors in this category charge a fee every time a run starts, so an hourly cron pays that fee 720 times a month before it collects a single row. This one has no start fee at all: you pay per trending search delivered, and nothing else.

Unofficial. This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google. "Google" and "Google Trends" are trademarks of Google LLC, used here only to describe what this tool reads.

Issues answered in about 3 hours.

Every row carries charged and missReason, so you can reconcile the invoice from the dataset itself without opening the console. Only rows with charged: true were billed.

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Output

One row per trending search, one shape for every country, so polls stack into a single table:

charged	geo	rank	query	approxTraffic	approxTrafficMin	startedAt	newsCount
true	US	1	james talarico	200+	200	2026-08-27T03:00:00.000Z	3
true	US	2	martha stewart	2000+	2000	2026-08-27T02:50:00.000Z	3
true	GB	1	conmebol sudamericana	500+	500	2026-08-27T02:40:00.000Z	2

(Real rows from a US/GB run.)

Every row also carries pubDate (Google's own timestamp text), picture, exploreUrl (opens the trend in Google Trends), news (an array of {title, source, url}), fetchedAt, status, retryable, statusReason and schemaVersion. The last row of every run is a summary row with delivered, geosDelivered, stoppedBy, resumeCursor and chargedEvents.

Two fields worth understanding

approxTraffic is a floor, not a count. Google publishes "500+", never an exact number. The text you see is exactly what Google published, and approxTrafficMin is its lower bound as an integer. Nothing here is estimated, rounded or invented.

startedAt is when the trend started, not when you fetched it. It comes from Google's own timestamp, converted to ISO-8601 UTC, with the original string kept beside it in pubDate so you never have to trust our parse.

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Agent / API paste-block

Actor:      steadyfetch/google-trends-now-scraper
Required:   geo                (string, two-letter country code — leave empty for
                                uncharged sample rows)
Optional:   geos               (array of country codes, polled in one run)
            maxTrendsPerGeo    (integer, default 10 — Google publishes 10 per country)
            minTraffic         (integer, default 0 — skip trends below this floor)
            includeNews        (boolean, default true)
            maxItems           (integer, default 100 — hard cap for the whole run)
            maxRunSeconds      (integer, default 120 — clean stop, never a timeout kill)
Charges:    trending-search    once per delivered trending search
Note:       omit a field to take its default; do NOT send null (the platform refuses a
            null before the run starts)
Build spec: https://apify.com/steadyfetch/google-trends-now-scraper/api
Token:      https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/steadyfetch~google-trends-now-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"geo":"US","geos":["GB","IN"],"includeNews":true}'

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What you actually get per country

Google publishes 10 trending searches per country, refreshed continuously — that is the whole feed, so 10 is both the default and the ceiling for maxTrendsPerGeo. This actor does not pretend to offer a top 20.

How fast does it turn over? Measured over scheduled hourly polls: the US and India lists turned over by 10 of 10 and 8–10 of 10 trends per hour, Great Britain by 2–5 of 10. An hourly schedule sees genuinely new trends every time; a daily one will miss most of them.

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Countries

Any two-letter country code Google covers — US, GB, IN, DE, BR, SA, AU, CA and so on. Pass one in geo, or several in geos to poll them in a single run. Each country is fetched independently, so one being unavailable never blocks the others.

A code Google does not publish trends for comes back as an uncharged invalid_geo row naming the fix — it is never retried and never charged.

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What you are never charged for

situation	status	run status
Google does not cover the country you asked for	invalid_geo	SUCCEEDED — the row names the fix, and it is not retried
Google rate-limited or dropped the request	upstream_unavailable	SUCCEEDED — re-runnable, and the row says so
Google did not serve its trending searches for that country on this run	endpoint_unavailable	SUCCEEDED — re-runnable, and the row says so
Google answered normally and published nothing	empty_upstream	SUCCEEDED
Your minTraffic filtered every trend out	filtered_out	SUCCEEDED — the row names the setting
A country code we could not read	input_error	SUCCEEDED — the row names the fix, no request is made
Your own maxItems / maxRunSeconds / cost cap	stopped_at_limit	SUCCEEDED — summary row + resumeCursor

A refusal is reported as a refusal, never dressed up as "this country has no trends", and a country code Google rejects is never retried — retrying a typo just asks the same wrong question again on your budget.

This actor may fail when the platform changes things — failed items are never charged.

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Limits are hard limits

maxTrendsPerGeo, maxItems and maxRunSeconds stop the run exactly where you set them. The run still finishes successfully, the summary row names which limit bound, and resumeCursor lists the countries that were not reached.

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FAQ

Does {} cost anything? No. With no country set it returns uncharged sample rows so you can see the exact output shape before spending anything. That run contacts nothing at all.

Can I run this on an hourly schedule? That is what it is for. There is no start fee, so a schedule pays exactly the same per trend as a one-off run. Point an Apify schedule at it with geo set and append the results.

How do I tell which trends are new since my last poll? Compare query against your previous run for the same geo. Google does not publish a stable id for a trend, and it sometimes re-words one (américa - columbus crew became américa vs columbus nine minutes later), so an exact-string comparison will slightly over-count new trends. Normalising the text before comparing gets you closer.

Why is there no category on a trend? Because Google's trending feed does not publish one. Adding a column we would have to guess at would be worse than leaving it out.

Is this the same as the Google Trends Scraper? No. That one answers "how has interest in my keyword moved over time". This one answers "what is the whole country searching right now". If you want both, run both — they share the same extraction engine.

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Steadyfetch trends & keyword suite

One actor per surface, one job each, the same contract everywhere: all-inclusive pay per event, no start fee, charged only on delivery — so a workflow built for one of them ports to the next.

What you want	Actor
Interest over time, related queries, regions, compare	Google Trends · No Charge on Miss
What is trending right now, by country	this actor
Rising and Breakout queries, with the real growth number	Breakout Keywords from Trends
Autocomplete suggestions across 5 engines	Autocomplete Keywords · 5 Engines
Monthly search volume and CPC for a keyword list	Keyword Volume & CPC · No Minimum
What is trending on social platforms	Social Trends · 4 Platforms

The rest of the steadyfetch shelf — same contract everywhere: all-inclusive pay per event, no start fee, charged only on delivery.

Family	Actors
Ad creative intelligence	Facebook · Google Ads video · TikTok · LinkedIn · Google Ads text & OCR
Trends & keywords	Google Trends · Trends Now · Breakout keywords · Autocomplete keywords · Keyword volume & CPC · Social trends
YouTube transcripts	YouTube videos · YouTube channels
Instagram	Reel transcripts · Profile posts
Jobs	Indeed · Career sites by domain · Glassdoor · Multi-board
Amazon	Products · Search · Bestsellers · Sellers
Any media file	Speech to Text · any link or file

Unlinked names are publishing shortly on the same account — search steadyfetch on Apify Store.

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Free templates

github.com/steadyfetch/n8n-templates — import-validated n8n workflows.