Google Trends compare: benchmark competitor brands

Google Trends compare puts several search terms on one chart, scaled against each other. That makes it the quickest free way to see how often people search for your competitors by name compared with you.

Type your brand, add each competitor as a comparison, set your country and a five-year range, and you have a read on relative brand demand in two minutes. Two limits matter from the start: it shows relative interest, not search volume, and small brands often show as zero. Both have workarounds below.

How to compare competitors in Google Trends

1. Open Google Trends and go to Explore. Google now runs two versions. The new Explore page compares up to eight terms or groups of terms and adds Gemini features if you sign in; Classic Explore compares up to five. Google's comparison help page lists both limits. Either works for this.
2. Enter your brand, and choose the search term or the topic from the dropdown. The next section explains which.
3. Add each competitor as a comparison, using the same choice (all terms or all topics).
4. Set the location to the country or region where you actually sell.
5. Set the time range. Past five years for the trajectory, past twelve months for seasonality.
6. Leave the category on all categories unless a brand name is also an ordinary word, then pick the relevant category.
7. Keep web search as the search type, or switch to YouTube or Google Shopping if that is where your category is searched.

Classic Explore puts everything in the address bar, so a comparison can be bookmarked and re-run every month:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=brand1,brand2,brand3&geo=GB&date=today%205-y

Change geo to your country code. Topics appear in the address as codes beginning /m/ or /g/ rather than as words.

Search term or topic?

Google's help defines the difference. A search term is "that precise sequence of characters in the language you typed". A topic is "a group of terms that share the same concept in any language", so it catches variants and other languages.

Use topics when every brand has one. If Google recognises a company, the dropdown offers it as a topic with a short description underneath. Topics handle misspellings and translations for you.

Use terms for smaller brands, and combine the variants yourself with a plus sign: acme + acmehq + acme app. Trends does not add misspellings, plurals or synonyms on its own.

Watch for apostrophes. Google's help says Trends filters out queries containing apostrophes and other special characters, so a brand written with one needs a topic or a variant without it.

Never mix the two in one comparison. A topic for one brand and a bare term for another is not a fair fight.

Brand names that are also ordinary words, like a company called Monday or Apple, need a topic or a qualifying word, otherwise you are measuring interest in the word.

Region and time range

Region. A national figure can hide a competitor who is dominant in one area. The interest by subregion map shows where each brand is searched relatively more. For local businesses, set the location to the narrowest region Trends offers and accept that many local brands will be too small to register.

Time. Five years shows who is growing. Twelve months shows seasonality. Ninety days is right for checking the effect of a launch. Longer ranges are shown at weekly or monthly points rather than daily, which smooths out short spikes.

Seasonality. Every brand in a category tends to rise and fall together with the season. So look at the gap between the lines, not the lines themselves. A competitor who closes the gap in your quiet month has gained, even if both lines fell.

Reading the chart

The scale. Google divides each data point by total searches in that place and time, then scales the result so that 100 is the highest point on the chart. Everything else is relative to that peak. Lines in the same comparison share one scale; two separate comparisons do not.

Zero means not enough data. It does not mean nobody searched.

Spikes. Hover over one and check the news for that week. Launches, funding announcements, outages, a TV campaign or a public row all show up. A spike that falls back to the old level is attention that did not last. A step up that holds is new, durable demand.

Related queries. Click into each competitor's related queries, because the modifiers tell you who is searching:

• "[brand] login" is existing customers. A rising line here is a growing user base.
• "[brand] pricing" is people evaluating them.
• "[brand] alternative" is unhappy users, and they are looking for you.
• "[brand] vs [your brand]" means buyers are comparing you directly.

Queries marked "Breakout" have grown sharply from a small base. They are early signals, not trends yet.

Noise. Google works from a sample and adds small random noise for privacy, so run the comparison on a couple of different days before you report a small movement.

Turning it into share of search

Share of search is your brand's search interest as a percentage of all the brands in your category combined. It is a rough proxy for share of demand, and the share of search definition covers what it can and cannot predict.

To calculate it, take each brand's average over the period. Classic Explore shows an average beside the chart when you compare terms; otherwise download the data from the chart and average it. Your share is your average divided by the total of all the averages.

With more brands than one comparison allows, use an anchor. Put the same large brand in every batch, then rescale each batch so the anchor matches:

The rescale factor is 60 divided by 50. The total across all five is 132, and each share is its average divided by 132.

What Google Trends cannot tell you

Absolute volume. For real numbers, take your own brand's monthly searches from a keyword tool and use the Trends ratio. If you get roughly 2,400 searches a month and a competitor's line averages half of yours, they are somewhere near 1,200.

Searches anywhere else. Brand searches on Amazon, TikTok, app stores and AI assistants are invisible here. In categories where people discover brands on those platforms, Google interest understates the newer brands.

Small brands. Many local and niche businesses sit at zero. Widen the region and time range first. If they still read zero, use keyword tool volumes instead and stop trying to make Trends answer.

Customers. Interest is not purchase. A brand in the news for a bad reason gets a spike in searches and a fall in sales.

A five-minute monthly routine

Bookmark the comparison. On the first Monday of the month, note each brand's average, any spike with its cause, and new related queries for each competitor. After a year you have a share of search trend for the whole category, which you can set beside the traffic estimates from the competitor website traffic guide and the other measures in competitor benchmarking.