Analysts Use Anchor Keyword Trick to Compare Unlimited Terms in Google Trends

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Google Trends restricts comparisons to five search terms at a time, and separate queries cannot be directly combined because each chart is independently normalized to its own 0–100 scale. To work around this, analysts insert a single stable 'anchor' keyword into every group of four new terms, then use the anchor's varying values across groups to calculate a scaling factor. Applying these factors aligns all groups onto one common scale, which can then be re-normalized to produce accurate relative rankings across any number of keywords. A developer has automated this method into a cloud-based tool on Apify, which accepts unlimited keywords, supports multiple countries, and returns results as a unified comparable dataset with CSV export. The tool also handles Google's rate-limiting by routing requests through residential proxies.

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