The biggest thing Europeans asked Google this week was what the sky would do next. Weather searches led Google Trends’ daily feeds in several of our markets on 15 and 16 September: according to Google Trends, wetter reached 10K+ searches in Switzerland and 5K+ in Italy on 16 September, počasí 10K+ in Czechia the same day, meteo 5K+ in Switzerland, meteo milano 5K+ in Italy, and погода 5K+ in Georgia on 16 and 17 September. Add weer, weather and metoffice in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece and the UK, and the forecast was the one query that trended in more countries than anything else.
Two notes on the data before the numbers get quoted anywhere. First, Google Trends’ daily feed gives rounded bands (500+, 5K+, 10K+) per query and country, so every figure here is approximate and describes a one-day spike, not steady demand. Second, our snapshots of the feeds cover 15–17 September; the feeds themselves list items back to 11 September. This is the first weekly trend review on this blog, so the comparison is between markets, not with an earlier week.
What was behind the weather searches
The news items Google Trends attaches to each query tell a consistent story: the last warm days of summer, followed by a break. Novinky.cz wrote on 14 September that Czechia would see up to 27 °C before a cold front crossed the country on Wednesday, bringing rain and local thunderstorms; iDNES.cz called 16 September “the last summer day” and mapped where the front would bring rain. In Belgium, VRT NWS asked on 15 September whether it was the last warm day of the year, with up to 28 °C in places and thunderstorms expected in the evening. In the UK, BBC Weather had written on 12 September that temperatures would climb to summer-like levels over the weekend and into Monday, with cooler, unsettled conditions returning by midweek and no heatwave in sight.
The pattern is the same across the German-language, Czech, Dutch and English feeds: a warm spell peaked on Monday and Tuesday, and the front arrived on Wednesday. People searched the forecast at the moment the weather was about to change. The Georgian spike in погода on 16–17 September comes with local forecast items for those days rather than a single event, so the cause there is simply the forecast itself.
The week in queries
| Query | Markets (peak day) | ≈ Searches per Google Trends |
|---|---|---|
| wetter | CH (16 Sep), IT (16 Sep), GR (15–16 Sep) | 10K+ · 5K+ · 2K+ |
| počasí | CZ (16 Sep) | 10K+ |
| погода | GE (16–17 Sep) | 5K+ |
| meteo / meteo milano | CH (16 Sep) / IT (16 Sep) | 5K+ / 5K+ |
| weather | GR (16 Sep), GE (16 Sep) | 2K+ · 1K+ |
| metoffice | GB (15 Sep) | 2K+ |
| weer | GR (15 Sep), ES (16 Sep) | 1K+ · 1K+ |
| fnac | FR (16 Sep) | 5K+ |
| disney+ | DE (16 Sep) | 2K+ |
Two non-weather entries are in the table because they are business signals of a different kind. fnac trended in France on 16 September with news items about the last day of the French Days, the autumn sales event in which Cdiscount, Amazon and Darty were running clearance offers according to Le Parisien, 20 Minutes and Ouest-France. disney+ trended in Germany on 16 September alongside Golem.de’s report that all Disney+ subscription tiers will now carry advertising. The first is a retail calendar moment; the second is a new ad inventory in a market we work in. Both are worth their own follow-up.
What it means for your business
Weather is a demand trigger you can see coming. The forecast is public days in advance, and this week’s data shows that people act on it: they search before the change, not after. If what you sell depends on the season, the question is whether your pages and campaigns move with the forecast or with the calendar. Autumn collections, heating and boiler servicing, tyres, indoor activities, delivery notices during storms: the search for these starts on the day the forecast turns. Our SEO work on seasonal businesses begins with a simple list of which forecast changes send people to which category, and a check that the landing pages for those categories are live and indexed before the weather moves, not the week after. We looked at the opposite problem, pages that exist but never catch demand, in why regular publishing sends no search traffic.
Schedule paid campaigns by forecast, not by month. Ad platforms let you adjust bids and budgets by day and hour, and a forecast is a better signal than a fixed date for when to raise them. For a garden centre, a cold front is the day to stop; for a boiler engineer, it is the day to start. In paid advertising campaigns this is a weekly habit rather than a feature: read the forecast for each market on Monday, set the schedule, and compare the cost per enquiry on the days before and after the change in your own account.
Local means local weather, too. The same week produced different trending queries in each country and, in Italy, a city-level query, meteo milano. A business that serves several regions should expect demand to move regionally with the weather and let its structure follow: separate campaigns or ad groups per region, and content that names the place.
Read the two retail signals. The French Days show what a sales event does to search in France: the retailer’s brand name trends on the closing day. If you sell in France and were not in the event, the lesson is at least to plan content and offers around its dates. Disney+ carrying ads on every tier in Germany adds a new place to reach a streaming audience; whether the pricing suits a small advertiser will become clear when the inventory is on sale.
Treat the numbers as directions, not targets. A 10K+ band in Switzerland tells you that a wave was large relative to that country’s daily trends; it does not tell you the size of your own market. The useful move is to keep your own record: which forecast changes, in which markets, correlate with your enquiries. After a few seasons that record is worth more than any external trend feed.
