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Extracting Google Trends related queries: top, rising and breakout

Google Trends related queries are the searches made by the people who searched a term: top queries rank by popularity on a 0–100 scale, and rising queries rank by growth over the previous period. A rising query labelled Breakout grew by more than 5,000%, which is how new brands and subtopics surface before keyword tools report any volume.

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Google Trends related queries for sunscreen: top queries and breakout rising queries

Google Trends related queries are the other searches that people made together with a term in the selected location and time range. Google Trends returns them as 2 lists: top queries and rising queries.

Top and rising related queries differ in what they rank and in the number they carry.

ListRanks byValueExample (sunscreen, US, 5 years)
Top queriesPopularity0–100 scorebest sunscreen 100 · face sunscreen 87 · mineral sunscreen 63
Rising queriesGrowth over the previous periodGrowth %, or Breakoutbeauty of joseon: Breakout

Breakout in Google Trends means a rising query grew by more than 5,000%, so Google shows a label instead of a percentage. For «sunscreen» in the United States, 11 rising queries carried the Breakout label, led by «beauty of joseon», «beauty of joseon sunscreen» and «joseon sunscreen», in the Actor’s sample output. Breakouts surface new brands and subtopics before keyword tools report any search volume.

There are 3 steps to extract related queries via the Google Trends API.

  1. Keep includeRelatedQueries on, which is the default.
  2. Read topQueries and risingQueries: each item has query, value, formattedValue and isBreakout.
  3. Use breakoutQueries for the list of Breakout queries alone.
"risingQueries": [
  { "query": "beauty of joseon", "value": 73650, "formattedValue": "Breakout", "isBreakout": true }
]

Related topics come back empty through Google’s API, so the Google Trends API returns related queries and no related topics.

Related queries and Trending Now answer different questions: related queries show what grows around a keyword you choose, while Google Trends Trending Now shows what a whole country is searching right now, with no keyword needed.

Is Breakout the same as a rising query?

No. Every Breakout query is a rising query, but only rising queries that grew by more than 5,000% carry the Breakout label.

Are related queries search volumes?

No. Top queries carry a 0–100 popularity score and rising queries carry a growth percentage, both relative to the term.

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