TL;DR — Google Trends has no official API, and browser-based scrapers fail half the time. This tutorial shows how to get competitor search-interest data (12-month trend, US state ranking, rising and Breakout queries) for five brands in one 21-second run costing $0.035, and how to turn it into a weekly Slack alert for about $0.07 a week. Every number below comes from a real run on 2026-11-08.

Who this is for: SEO and content teams, brand and category managers, market researchers, and anyone building an AI agent that needs a quick "is this brand trending?" answer.

Why automate Google Trends competitor analysis?

Google Trends is the cheapest competitive-intelligence source there is. It tells you when demand for a competitor peaks, where in the country they are strongest, and which new product names people have started searching for — weeks before that shows up in sales data.

The problem is getting the data out.…