Google Trends is not marketed as an intelligence tool. It is presented as a utility for marketers and journalists trying to understand what people are searching for. But the data it surfaces—aggregated, anonymized, and publicly accessible—has properties that make it useful for open source intelligence work: it is behaviorally derived, it is difficult to falsify, and it updates in near real time. What people search for under conditions of stress, uncertainty, or crisis reflects what they actually believe and fear, not what they say in surveys or state media.