Google Trends is free, it takes ten seconds to open, and most Australian businesses still use it wrong. They type in a word, see a line go up, and read that as “more people are searching”. That is not what the line means.
So instead of another feature tour, we pulled real Google Trends curves for eight Australian service terms on 12 September 2026 and put the numbers in front of you. Tax returns. Ducted heating. Pest control. Air conditioning. The kind of work Australian businesses actually sell.
Below you will see which month each one peaks, how big the swing is, and what to do about it. You will also see where Google Trends quietly misleads you, and what to check next to be sure.
What Google Trends is
Google Trends is a free tool from Google that shows how search interest in a term has moved over time. Google describes the data as “a random sample of aggregated, anonymized, and categorized Google and YouTube searches” in its Search Central documentation.
You can filter by country, by state, by time range going back to 2004, by category, and by Google property (web, images, news, shopping, YouTube). You can compare up to five terms at once. You can see which states search a term most. You can see related queries.
What you cannot see is how many people searched. Not once. Not anywhere in the tool. That single fact is where most of the mistakes start, so we will deal with it properly further down.
Eight Australian demand curves, pulled on 12 September 2026
We ran each of these as a single term, location Australia, web search, past 12 months. Each curve is scored against its own busiest week, so 100 is that term’s peak week and everything else is a share of it.
| Search term | Peak week (scored 100) | Quietest week | Low score | Size of the swing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tax return | Week of 28 June 2026 | Week of 21 December 2025 | 7 | About 14 times |
| ducted heating | Weeks of 31 May and 5 July 2026 | Week of 21 December 2025 | 33 | About 3 times |
| air conditioning | Week of 4 January 2026 | Weeks of 19 and 26 April 2026 | 50 | 2 times |
| solar panels | Week of 22 March 2026 | Week of 21 December 2025 | 48 | About 2 times |
| plumber | Week of 7 September 2025 | Week of 25 January 2026 | 55 | About 1.8 times |
| pest control | Week of 4 January 2026 | Week of 12 July 2026 | 59 | About 1.7 times |
| wedding photographer | Week of 10 May 2026 | Weeks of 21 September 2025 and 21 December 2025 | 58 | About 1.7 times |
| personal trainer | Week of 22 March 2026 | Week of 21 September 2025 | 63 | About 1.6 times |
A few things jump out of that table.
Tax return is the most seasonal term we looked at. It sat at 10 to 13 all through summer and autumn, climbed through May and June, then hit 100 in the week of 28 June 2026. Then it fell away through July and August. There is a second, smaller spike in the week of 26 October 2025, where it jumped to 46 and dropped to 16 the very next week. If you sell tax help, your whole year is decided in about eight weeks.
Ducted heating is a clean winter business. It bottomed at 33 in late December, hit 100 in the week of 31 May 2026, stayed in the 70s and 80s through winter, and was already sliding back to the 50s by late August. That is a three times swing between the quiet week and the busy one.
Pest control and air conditioning are the mirror image. Both hit 100 in the week of 4 January 2026. Pest control fell to 59 in mid July. Air conditioning fell to 50 in late April. Two businesses, opposite calendars, same country.
Plumber is close to flat. It spent most of the year between 55 and 75, with one spike to 100 in the week of 7 September 2025 that never repeated. A flat curve is still useful information. It tells you that for a plumber, timing the calendar matters far less than showing up every month of the year.
The one week that was quiet for almost everything
The week of 21 December 2025 was the low point of the entire year for tax return, ducted heating, solar panels and wedding photographer, and close to it for pest control. That is Christmas week. Australians stop researching services and start cooking.
This is worth knowing before you panic about a traffic drop in late December, and before you spend money trying to fix one. We wrote more about this pattern across the year in our guide to Australian search demand seasonality.
How to read the 0 to 100 number
Here is the part that trips people up. The number is not a count of searches. Google’s own FAQ about Trends data says each data point “is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents”, and that the result is “then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics”.
In plain English:
- 100 means “this was the busiest point in the range you asked for”. Nothing more.
- 50 means “about half as busy as that busiest point”.
- 0 usually means “not enough searches to report”, not “nobody searched”.
- Change the date range and every number changes, because the peak moves.
So when ducted heating shows 100 in June, that does not mean it beat air conditioning. It means June was its own best month. Two terms both showing 100 can be a hundred times apart in real size.
One more practical note. The most recent bar on the chart is usually a part-week and it reads low. In our 12 September 2026 pull, every single term showed a dip in the final week because that week was not finished. Ignore the last data point.
Comparing two terms is where it gets useful
When you put two terms in the same chart, they share one scale. Now the heights mean something.
We compared “solar panels” and “solar battery” in Australia from January 2020 to September 2026. In January 2020, solar panels scored 42 and solar battery scored 17. Solar panels was roughly two and a half times bigger.
The two lines crossed in April 2025, at 35 and 37. From there battery searches kept climbing while panel searches stayed flat. By March and April 2026, solar battery hit 100 and solar panels sat at 65 to 69. Over the whole period the averages were 41 for solar panels and 33 for solar battery, which hides the fact that the newer term now leads.
That is a real change in what Australians are shopping for, visible for free, in about a minute. If you install solar and your site still leads with panels, that chart is your brief. We covered how to act on it in seasonal solar marketing.
The rule when comparing: only compare terms that are roughly the same size. If one term is fifty times bigger, the smaller one gets squashed into a flat line near zero and you learn nothing about it.
Filter by state, because Australia is not one market
This is the filter most guides mention and almost nobody uses. Under the chart, Google Trends shows interest by subregion. For Australia that means state and territory.
We ran “ducted heating” for Australia over the past 12 months. Here is how the states scored against each other:
| State or territory | Relative interest (highest = 100) |
|---|---|
| Victoria | 100 |
| Australian Capital Territory | 41 |
| Tasmania | 25 |
| South Australia | 13 |
| Northern Territory | 8 |
| New South Wales | 5 |
| Western Australia | 4 |
| Queensland | 2 |
Victoria is not slightly ahead. It is twenty times New South Wales and fifty times Queensland. “Ducted heating” is close to a Victorian and Canberra phrase.
If you sell heating nationally and you built one page called “ducted heating”, you have written a Victorian page. In Queensland the demand is under different words entirely. Run your own service term this way before you write a single location page, and before you set state level bid adjustments in Google Ads.
Rising related queries are a free content brief
Scroll past the chart and Google Trends shows related queries in two lists. “Top” is what people search most alongside your term. “Rising” is what grew fastest recently.
We pulled related queries for “heat pump hot water” in Australia. The top list included “hot water system”, “solar hot water”, “best heat pump hot water”, “hot water rebate” and “heat pump hot water brisbane”. The rising list had “heat pump hot water brisbane” up 90 percent and “heat pump hot water systems” up 50 percent.
Look at what that tells you without any paid tool. People want a rebate answer, a best-of comparison, and a Brisbane page. That is three pieces of content, in priority order, straight from Google. Our guide to heat pump hot water lead generation goes into what to put on each one.
One honest warning. When we pulled the rising list for “solar battery”, several entries came back completely unrelated to solar, including car insurance quotes and university courses. Related query lists can pick up noise. Read them, use the ones that obviously fit your business, and ignore the rest rather than assuming Google knows something you do not.
Use the curve to time content and ad budget
A new page does not rank the week you publish it. It usually needs a few months to get indexed, get links, get clicks and settle. So publishing a winter heating page in June is publishing it late.
Work backwards from your peak. Publish two to three months early. Lift ad spend about one month early, when the curve starts climbing rather than when it tops out.
| Service | Peak in our data | Publish content | Lift ad budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ducted heating | Late May to early July | March | April and May |
| Air conditioning | Early January | October | November and December |
| Pest control | Early January | October | November and December |
| Tax help | Last week of June | April | May and June |
| Solar and batteries | March and April | December and January | February |
| Wedding photography | January | October | November and December |
The same logic works in reverse. Ducted heating was already back to 53 by late August. Holding a winter budget into September is spending into a falling market. If you are working out what that spend should look like, our numbers on Google Ads cost in Australia give you a starting range.
Watching a brand name spike
Put your own business name into Google Trends, set the range to the past 90 days, and set the location to your state. If you run TV, radio, a letterbox drop or a big sponsorship, you should see a bump in the week it ran.
Two cautions. Brand names for small businesses usually sit under the reporting threshold, so you will get a flat line at zero. That is not proof nobody searched you. It means the term is too small for Trends to report. Google’s FAQ says plainly that “search terms with low volume appear as 0”.
The second is that the same FAQ warns Trends adds “small and random fluctuations that don’t represent actual search behavior”, and that this is “most noticeable on queries with low or no search interest”. A jagged line on a small brand term is usually noise, not a campaign result.
Check whether a keyword is dying before you build a page for it
This is the check almost nobody runs, and it is the one that saves the most money.
We ran “yellow pages” in Australia from January 2020 to September 2026. It scored 100 in February 2020. By August 2026 it was at 21. That is a fall of roughly 80 percent, and it has been a steady slide the whole way, not a dip.
Before you commission a page, run the term over five years. If the line has been sloping down for three years, a first place ranking in 2027 is worth less than the same ranking was in 2022. Put the budget on a term that is flat or climbing instead.
Five mistakes people make with Google Trends
- Treating 100 as a number of searches. It is a share of a peak. A tiny term and a huge term can both show 100 on the same day.
- Comparing terms of very different sizes. The smaller one flattens to near zero and you conclude it has no demand, when really it has been scaled out of view.
- Reading noise on low volume terms. “Wedding photographer” hit 100 in a single week in May 2026 and never went near it again, while the January reading of 99 repeats every year. One is a spike, the other is the season. Google itself says Trends “is not a scientific poll”.
- Reading the last, unfinished week as a crash. Every term we pulled showed a dip in the final part-week.
- Chasing a trend that has nothing to do with your business. Google’s Search Central docs put it well: “you shouldn’t write about something just because it’s trending”.
How Google Trends pairs with volume data and AI search checks
Google Trends tells you the shape and the timing. It will not tell you the size. For that you need a keyword volume tool, and the two do not always agree.
Here is the same set of terms, with the Trends swing next to the monthly search volume swing from our search data pull on 12 September 2026, Australia.
| Term | Trends low to high | Trends swing | Monthly searches, low to high | Volume swing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tax return | 7 to 100 | 14 times | 9,900 (Dec 2025) to 246,000 (Jul 2026) | 25 times |
| air conditioning | 50 to 100 | 2 times | 6,600 (Apr 2026) to 27,100 (Jan 2026) | 4 times |
| ducted heating | 33 to 100 | 3 times | 720 (Dec 2025) to 2,900 (Jul 2026) | 4 times |
| pest control | 59 to 100 | 1.7 times | 12,100 (Jun 2026) to 27,100 (Jan 2026) | 2.2 times |
| wedding photographer | 58 to 100 | 1.7 times | 1,900 (Dec 2025) to 3,600 (Jan 2026) | 1.9 times |
In every case the volume data shows a bigger swing than Google Trends does. The timing matches well. The size does not. So use Trends to decide when, and use volume data to decide how much.
Size also changes the decision. “Ducted heating” swings the same 4 times as “air conditioning”, but it moves between 720 and 2,900 searches a month while air conditioning moves between 6,600 and 27,100. Same shape, very different prize. A 3 percent difference in click share is worth ten times more on one than the other. If you want free and low cost options for pulling those numbers, we listed them in the best AI SEO tools for Australian businesses.
Then check what the AI answers say
There is a third check now, and it did not exist when most Google Trends guides were written. When we ran a live search for “how to use google trends” in Australia on 12 September 2026, an AI Overview sat above every organic result. It cited YouTube, Semrush, Mediavine, MonsterInsights and two Australian sites. Google’s own trends.google.com was the first blue link, with a Reddit thread second.
Trends can tell you a term is climbing. It cannot tell you whether the top of that search result page is now an AI answer that nobody clicks past. Before you commit to a keyword, search it and look at what sits above position one. We go through that process in Google AI Mode in Australia, and how to measure it in how to track AI visibility.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure in this post was pulled on 12 September 2026.
The curves came from the Google Trends explore data for location Australia, web search, in English. Single term curves use the past 12 months. The solar comparison and the yellow pages check use monthly data from January 2020 to September 2026. The state breakdown uses the past 12 months. Related queries use the past 12 months.
The monthly search volumes came from our search data pull for Australia in English, using the last 12 months of reported monthly figures. The search results observation came from our live search results check for Australia in English, desktop, on the same day.
We have not adjusted, smoothed or rounded any of the Trends scores. Where a curve looked odd, we have said so rather than tidied it.
FAQ
Is Google Trends free?
Yes. You do not need an account and there is no paid tier. You can use it at trends.google.com and Google publishes a getting started guide covering the explore page, comparisons, region results and related searches.
Does Google Trends show search volume?
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. It shows relative interest scored from 0 to 100 within whatever range you asked for. To get a count of searches you need a keyword volume tool such as Google Keyword Planner inside a Google Ads account. Use the two together.
How do I set Google Trends to Australia?
Open the explore page, then change the location dropdown from Worldwide to Australia. This matters more than people expect, because seasons are reversed here. A global chart for heating or air conditioning will show you the northern hemisphere calendar, which is exactly wrong for an Australian business. You can then narrow further to a single state.
How far back does Google Trends go?
Web search data goes back to 2004. Other properties such as YouTube and images start from 2008. Note that when you pick a long range, Google switches from weekly to monthly data points, which smooths out short spikes. Use five years or more to spot a long decline, and 12 months to spot the season.
Why does my business name show a flat line at zero?
Because the term does not have enough search volume for Google to report on it. Google’s FAQ states that terms with low volume appear as 0. It does not mean nobody searched your name. For small brand terms, Google Search Console gives you a far more accurate picture of your own branded searches, because it counts real impressions and clicks rather than sampling.
Can I rank for the keyword “google trends”?
Realistically, no. On our live check the term is dominated by Google’s own property, an AI Overview and large publisher sites. It is a high volume, low intent term for a service business anyway. The term gets around 40,500 searches a month in Australia, and almost none of them come from someone looking to hire anyone. Your time is better spent on the terms your customers search when they have a problem, which is usually a service plus a suburb.
If you want a hand with this
Google Trends is a starting point, not a strategy. It tells you when your market wakes up. Turning that into pages that rank, and ads that run at the right time, takes a bit more work.
If you would like someone to map your own demand curve and build the content calendar around it, have a look at our SEO services or send us your main service term and your state and we will tell you what the curve looks like.
