Lab 3: Google Trends for Chat GPT, Gemini and Claude for Marketing Analytics

Intro

This reports goal is to analyze which AI platforms are being used the most over the last five years. Google Trends data are reported on a relative scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the highest level of search interest during the selected time period.

Hypothesis for Peak Interest: ChatGPT’s massive spikes in search volume are largely driven by the fact that they were considered to be the first to be popularly available to the public. After it launched in 2022, their product was quickly adopted by the public. The highest peaks on the trend line typically correlate with major, highly publicized version releases.

While competitors have made recent gains—for example, Gemini experienced substantial traffic growth in late 2025 following the roll out of Gemini 3. ChatGPT’s deeply entrenched with their brand recognition continues to generate the highest volume of sustained web search interest.

Required Packages

# Run once to install
install.packages(c("gtrendsR", "tidyverse", "ggplot2", "scales",
                   "lubridate", "knitr", "kableExtra"))

library(gtrendsR)     # Pull data from Google Trends
library(tidyverse)    # Data manipulation and plotting
library(ggplot2)      # Visualization
library(scales)       # Axis formatting
library(lubridate)    # Date handling
library(knitr)        # Tables
library(kableExtra)   # Enhanced table formatting

Understanding the gtrends() Function

"now 1-H"        → Past hour
"now 4-H"        → Past 4 hours
"today 1-m"      → Past 30 days
"today 3-m"      → Past 90 days
"today 12-m"     → Past 12 months
"today+5-y"      → Past 5 years
"all"            → Since 2004

Tutorial 1: Single Keyword — Brand Search Interest

Query Google Trends

data <- read.csv("iot_raw.csv",
                header = TRUE)
head(data)

##         date hits keyword geo      time gprop category
## 1 2021-06-20    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0
## 2 2021-06-27    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0
## 3 2021-07-04    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0
## 4 2021-07-11    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0
## 5 2021-07-18    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0
## 6 2021-07-25    0 ChatGPT  US today+5-y   web        0

ai_trends <- gtrends( keyword = c(“ChatGPT”, “Gemini”, “Claude”), geo = “US”, time = “today+5-y” )

data$date <- as.POSIXct(data$date)

brand_colors <- c(
  "ChatGPT"  = "#FFC300",
  "Gemini" = "#D62300",
  "Claude" = "#0000FF"
)

ggplot(data, aes(x = date, y = hits, color = keyword)) +
  geom_smooth(method = "loess", span = 0.3, se = FALSE, linewidth = 1.2) +
  scale_color_manual(values = brand_colors) +
  scale_x_datetime(date_labels = "%Y", date_breaks = "1 year") +
  labs(
    title    = "Competitive Search Interest: AI Apps",
    subtitle = "United States | Past 5 Years | Web Search",
    x        = NULL,
    y        = "Relative Interest (0–100)",
    color    = "Brand",
    caption  = "Source: Google Trends via gtrendsR | github.com/utjimmyx"
  ) +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 12) +
  theme(
    plot.title    = element_text(face = "bold", size = 14),
    plot.subtitle = element_text(color = "gray50"),
    legend.position = "bottom"
  )

Summary of Findings

Analysis of the 5-year U.S. web search data pulled via the gtrendsR package reveals that ChatGPT clearly dominates the comparative trend lines, reaching the absolute peak of 100 on the relative search interest scale.

References

Google Trends. (2024). Google Trends Tutorials [YouTube series]. Google Search Central. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/09/google-trends-tutorials Massicotte, P., & Eddelbuettel, D. (2023). gtrendsR: Perform and Display Google Trends Queries [R package]. https://cran.r-project.org/package=gtrendsR Chan, M. (2019). Vignette: Google Trends with the gtrendsR package. https://martinctc.github.io/blog/vignette-google-trends-with-gtrendsr/