How long does a Google trend stay alive? Measuring trend duration with started_at and ended_at
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google LLC. "Google" and "Google Trends" are trademarks of Google LLC, used here only to describe the public data discussed. If you have ever built anything on top of "Trending Now" (a newsletter, an alerting bot, a content calendar), you know the uncomfortable part: a ranked list tells you what is trending, not for how long . A two-hour celebrity…
Google Trends provides a ranked list of trending terms, but it does not indicate how long each term has been trending or when it will end. Each trend has a start time and an end time, which can be used to measure its duration. To obtain this information, a small Apify Actor called Google Trends Scraper can be utilized. This tool returns the trending feed with the four fields: started_at, ended_at, is_active, and duration_minutes.
The is_active field indicates whether the trend is still ongoing, while duration_minutes calculates the length of the trend in minutes once it has ended. By filtering on is_active == true, you can improve the efficiency of a trend-driven workflow, as only a small percentage of trends remain active. Sorting the ended trends by duration_minutes allows you to distinguish between trends with longer legs and those that are simply short-lived spikes.
The data can be accessed through a single synchronous request using curl, and results are returned as JSON. The ten longest-lived ended trends can be easily identified by sorting the ended trends by duration_minutes. It is important to note that this approach does not account for all aspects of trend analysis, such as search volume, category, or rank.
Scheduling the Actor to run daily can help minimize redundancy, as it keeps track of previously delivered (term, start time) pairs and only returns new additions.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
