Google Trends is still one of the few free signals for "what are people searching for, relatively". But if you try to use it from code, you quickly run into three problems:

There is no generally available official API.

The unofficial routes (pytrends and friends) break or return 429 Too Many Requests .

Even when you get data, numbers from different requests are not comparable , because each request is rescaled to its own 0–100.

This post is a practical guide to all three, with Python you can copy. It is a different angle from my earlier post on comparing 100 keywords on one scale : here the focus is getting data reliably into Python and pandas, and knowing which option to pick.

Option 1: the official Google Trends API (alpha)

Google announced an official Trends API in July 2025 as an alpha with limited access by application. If you get in, use it — it's the cleanest route (consistently scaled data across requests).…