Google publishes a public RSS at https://trends.google.com/trending/rss plus a geo country code. A fetch in this session (27 Aug 2026) for the United States returned RSS 2.0, channel title "Daily Search Trends", and items with title, pubDate, ht:approx_traffic buckets such as 500+ and 10000+, plus ht:news_item nodes. That is Trending Now as XML. It is not a keyword API. Trends API is the JSON exit. Live-board fields are on the live feeds reference.
The feed URL is the whole contract
There is no API key. There is no keyword. geo is the filter. Libraries that wrap RSS, including trendspyg, are wrapping this file. Polling it is cheap. Parsing XML in every language is work the caller owns.
The older daily URL, https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily/rss, is retired. Node issue threads for google-trends-api report dailyTrends 404s after that move. The replacement is https://trends.google.com/trending/rss. Results are not a 1:1 copy of the old daily feed.
Trends API get_top_trends does not return XML. It returns an envelope. The body is a JSON string. Parse it. type selects the board. Google Trends is the Google live list. TikTok Trending Hashtags is a different board. RSS cannot switch boards.
XML items, no keyword history
ht:approx_traffic is a bucket, not a 0-100 index and not a daily series. There is no way to ask the feed what "air fryer" did last March. That question is get_time_series with source google search.
{
"mode": "get_top_trends",
"type": "Google Trends",
"limit": 10
}
No geo query string on that POST. Country handling, when needed, follows Trends API docs, not ?geo=.
geo is not a source
A geo country code is a Google feed parameter. source google search is a Trends API history parameter. type=Google Trends is a live-board parameter. Three different objects. Putting a country code in source is a 400.
Keep RSS when a human reader or a low-stakes Slack bot only needs today's Google spikes. Leave when the same function must return growth on a keyword or a Steam chart. The broader alternative map is on Google Trends API alternatives.