Over the last few weeks I've written a series of posts about one free, little-known data source: Wikipedia page views. This is the guide that ties them together.
If you only read one thing: every Wikipedia article has a public count of how many people read it each month, going back to 2015, and you can chart it in Google Sheets for free. I built a template that does it in one step, the Wikipedia Trends Tracker. Paste two links, get five years on one chart.
The short answer
To track trends with Wikipedia page views, pick the Wikipedia article for each topic, pull its monthly human page views from Wikimedia's free pageviews API, and chart several years side by side. Read the floor, not the peak: a trend keeps rising low points, a fad falls back. The free Trends Tracker template for Google Sheets does the pulling and charting for you.
1. What page views are, and why they're useful
Page views are real counts of people who opened an article. They're published free by the Wikimedia Foundation, with bots counted separately. Unlike Google Trends' 0 to 100 score, the numbers don't change when you change the chart.
2. Getting the data into Google Sheets
You can call the API yourself with a short Apps Script function, or use the template, which already has it wired up. Either way, watch for renamed articles: their history is split across titles.
- How to use the Wikipedia pageviews API in Google Sheets
- Why a Wikipedia page's views suddenly drop to zero
3. Reading the chart
Compare against something similar, look at years rather than months, and judge a topic by where it settles after a spike.
- How to tell a trend from a fad, with five years of data
- How to compare the popularity of two things with real data
4. Using it for real work
The same chart answers different questions depending on who's asking.
- Marketers and founders: track brand and competitor interest over time, and use the free trend research template for market research.
- Writers and creators: find evergreen content topics.
- Journalists and researchers: measure public interest in a topic, and cite it properly.
- Students: real data for a school project.
- Investors: page views as an attention signal for research, with its limits spelled out.
5. Real comparisons to learn from
Three-way comparisons from this series:
And live two-way charts, updated from the API:
- Pickleball vs Tennis
- Notion vs Obsidian
- Tesla vs BYD
- Semaglutide vs Tirzepatide
- Barbie vs Oppenheimer
- ChatGPT vs Claude
- Coke vs Pepsi
- Google Sheets vs Excel
The five rules I keep coming back to
- Use monthly data over years. Days and weeks are noise.
- Read the floor. Peaks are news. Low points are interest.
- Always compare. One line on its own tells you little, because big articles drift down over time.
- Check for renames. A cliff in one month is a moved article.
- Say what it measures. Readers, not buyers, fans, or users.
FAQ
Is Wikipedia page view data free?
Yes. It's public, needs no API key, and goes back to July 2015.
Do I need to code?
No. The template makes the API calls. You paste Wikipedia links.
How many topics can I compare?
Up to five on one chart.
Is the template free?
Yes. The Wikipedia Trends Tracker is a free unlock on Better Sheets.
Start tracking. Get the free Wikipedia Trends Tracker, paste two links, and see five years of real interest on one chart.