DataForSEO's Google Trends overview is honest about the object. The API reprints Explore. It returns a relative popularity rate, a location map, related topics, and related queries. It compares at most five keywords. It covers Google Search, News, Images, Shopping (froogle), and YouTube. It does not cover a live TikTok board or an Amazon Best Sellers category. Trends API is the exit when Explore is the wrong surface. Task fields versus mode sit on Trends API vs DataForSEO.
Explore is the product
A DataForSEO Trends call is not a generic keyword-data call. It is /v3/keywords_data/google_trends/explore/live or the Standard pair task_post then task_get. Auth is Basic, login plus API password, not a Bearer trend key.
The payload is a task array. Fields include keywords, location_name, type (web, news, youtube, images, froogle), date_from, and item types such as google_trends_graph or google_trends_queries_list. Related topics and queries need a single keyword. That is Google's Explore UI expressed as JSON.
Live versus Standard
Live is one POST and a wait. Standard is a queue. Standard can attach pingback_url or postback_url. DataForSEO documents up to 2000 API calls per minute on that family. The rate is a task rate, not a trend-score SLA.
A cron that only wants yesterday versus today does not need a task id. Trends API get_growth takes source, keyword, and a percent_growth window such as 12M. The window list is on growth windows. No poll. Parse the body string.
Five keywords, five Google properties
The five-keyword cap is a Google Explore cap. DataForSEO did not invent it. The five properties are also Google's. YouTube in that list is YouTube search interest on Trends, not the YouTube live board Trends API exposes as type YouTube.
{
"mode": "get_time_series",
"source": "youtube",
"keyword": "air fryer"
}
That source is a Trends API string. It is not DataForSEO's type=youtube on an Explore task. Mixing the two names is a 400.
The stop is every surface that is not Explore
DataForSEO can keep selling Explore next to the rest of the Keyword Data catalog. Check the vendor's current pricing for live versus Standard. The stop is Amazon Best Sellers, Steam player charts, Wikipedia pageviews, app download series, and any live board that is not a Google Trends page.
Stay when related queries on a Google property are the deliverable. Leave when the same dashboard has to plot google search next to tiktok on one 0-100 scale. The named-tool map continues on the SerpApi page.