Etsy now has its own keyword tool. It lives in Shop Manager under Stats, it is called Marketplace Insights, and it shows something no outside tool can: Etsy's own count of searches and listings for a keyword. That alone makes it worth your 15 free searches a week. This post quotes exactly what Etsy says the tool does, verified on 6 November 2026, then shows — with measured data from 1,481 keywords tracked daily since August — the four things a 30-day window structurally cannot tell you, and a workflow that uses Etsy's numbers for what they are good at and a longer history for the rest.
The short version
- Etsy's words: 15 free keyword searches a week, results kept 7 days, unlimited with Etsy Plus, data from the last 30 days.
- It is the only place with Etsy's real search counts — use it to confirm a phrase is searched at all.
- A 30-day window cannot show the shape of a year: ‘family christmas pjs’ reads as hot in November and is an index 1 in January.
- Nor can it show direction: the share of keywords rising climbed from 28% in August to 48% in November.
- Pair it with a five-year history and a page-1 read, and keep your own record — Etsy deletes the result after 7 days.
Marketplace Insights is Etsy's native keyword tool: Shop Manager → Stats → Marketplace Insights. Etsy's help article says sellers ‘can explore up to 15 keyword searches per week for free’, that results ‘remain available to you for 7 days’, that Etsy Plus subscribers can ‘search for unlimited keywords’, and that the data covers ‘the number of searches and listings on Etsy from the last 30 days’. Use it for the one thing only Etsy has: confirming a phrase is actually typed into Etsy. Then cover its four blind spots — year shape, direction, what page 1 looks like, and memory — with a five-year demand history such as the free Keyword History Explorer or the paid Keyword Research.
→ track a phrase’s direction and seasonality, with the Etsy page 1 read for you
01What Marketplace Insights is, in Etsy’s words
Everything in this section is quoted from Etsy's Help Center article ‘How Do I Use Etsy's Marketplace Insights Tool?’, read on 6 November 2026.
- Where: ‘go to Shop Manager’, ‘Select Stats’, ‘Select Marketplace Insights’. ‘At this time, Marketplace Insights is only available on the desktop and mobile web versions of Etsy.’
- Quota: ‘Sellers can explore up to 15 keyword searches per week for free.’ With Etsy Plus, ‘you're able to search for unlimited keywords’.
- Memory: ‘The results of your 15 free searches remain available to you for 7 days from the time you originally searched that keyword.’
- Data: you can ‘view related data such as the number of searches and listings on Etsy from the last 30 days’, ‘Discover the most-searched keywords related to the categories you sell in’, ‘View terms related to your searched keyword’, and ‘Explore trending searches in your categories over the past 30 days’.
- Limits Etsy states itself: ‘No, Marketplace Insights won't update your listings for you.’
So: Etsy search counts, Etsy listing counts, related and trending terms, a 30-day look-back, 15 searches a week, a 7-day memory. That is a precise, honest scope.
02What the 30-day window does well
Give credit where it is due. For eleven years sellers argued about ‘Etsy search volume’ using numbers that no tool outside Etsy could actually see — the search volume truth post explains why every third-party volume is a model. Marketplace Insights ends that argument for one question: is this phrase searched on Etsy at all, and roughly how much against how many listings, right now.
That makes it the right tool for three jobs. Confirming a phrase before you build a listing around it. Comparing two spellings or word orders of the same idea for the last month. And reading the ‘most-searched’ and ‘trending’ lists in your own category as a shortlist of phrases to look at more closely. Fifteen searches a week is enough for those three jobs if you spend them deliberately — which is also why the rest of this post matters: the questions you should not spend them on.
03Gap 1: a 30-day window cannot show the shape of a year
Most Etsy phrases are seasonal. In our keyword store, 5,675 phrases have a five-year Google Trends profile, and the median swing between a phrase's peak month and its low month is 83%. For 48% of them January is the low month; February (23.5%) and April (18.5%) are the most common peaks. A 30-day read lands somewhere on that curve without telling you where.
Take ‘family christmas pjs’, measured on 3 November 2026. Any 30-day view that week shows a phrase at its hottest. The five-year shape below says more: a slow climb from August, a November peak, a December tail — and an index of 1 in January. That is the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘has three weeks left’. The reverse case is ‘fall porch sign’: a late-October 30-day read shows a phrase collapsing (54 in September, 27 in October, 0 in November), while the five-year shape shows it reliably returning every August. One tool tells you it is dying; the other tells you to list it again in July. The method for turning the shape into a list-by date is in when to list on Etsy.
A 30-day read in early November sees only the peak. The five-year shape shows the August start, the November top and the January index of 1 — so the phrase has weeks of demand left, not months. 27,363 competing listings and a 55% promoted page 1 say what the fight looks like.
04Gap 2: it cannot show direction
A single 30-day number has no slope. Since 23 August 2026 we have snapshotted 1,481 Etsy keywords every day, recording for each whether Google demand is rising, flat or falling against the previous period. The share of keywords in a rising state moved from 27.8% in August to 33.0% in September, 47.9% in October and 48.5% in the first week of November — the Q4 build-up, measured. On the latest snapshot 35.8% of keywords were rising, 48.8% flat and 15.3% falling.
Year over year the picture is even less static: of 1,479 keywords, only 36.2% sit within five percent of last year. 33.7% are up more than 5%, 20.2% are down more than 5%, and 14.1% have more than doubled. A phrase can show a healthy 30-day count while sitting on a two-year decline, or a modest count while doubling year on year. Etsy's tool reports the level; the trend is a separate question, and the one that decides whether a listing you make today still has buyers next spring. Reading the direction signal covers how to interpret it.
The Q4 build-up as a slope. A single 30-day count for any one of these months would show a level, not this climb.
Only 36% of keywords are where they were a year ago. A 30-day level cannot tell you which of the other 64% you are holding.
A 30-day window tells you where a keyword is. It cannot tell you where it is going, or whether it comes back next year.
05Gap 3: it cannot show what page 1 looks like
Marketplace Insights reports a listing count. Competition is not a count; it is who is on page 1, how many of them are ads, and whether a shop your size is already there. Across 3,162 US searches we read this autumn, the median search had 18,544 results and the median page 1 was 50% promoted listings. Every extra word in a phrase cut the field by three to four times: one-word phrases had a median 303,984 results, two words 103,934, three words 30,402, four words 7,693.
The listing count also hides the thing that matters most to a new shop: whether small shops already rank. In our page-1 study, 31.9% of page-1 cards belonged to shops with under 100 reviews. Two phrases with the same 30-day counts can have a page 1 owned by three established shops or one with eight small ones. Only reading the page tells you which — by hand, logged out, or with the Niche Finder, which names the small shops already there.
Each extra word cuts the field roughly three to four times. A listing count alone does not say who is in that field — page 1 does.
06Gap 4: it cannot remember
Etsy says your results ‘remain available to you for 7 days’. After that the number is gone, and next month's 15 searches start from zero. Keyword research is cumulative — the value is in comparing March to March, not in a single reading — so a tool with a 7-day memory needs a notebook beside it.
The cheapest notebook is a spreadsheet: phrase, date, Etsy searches, Etsy listings. Add the five-year peak month from the free Keyword History Explorer, which reads Google Trends for any phrase with no account. If you want the history kept for you, Keyword Research stores every phrase you check with its direction and seasonality, and re-reads the Etsy page 1 for it; that is the data this post is drawn from.
07How to use both together: a 15-search week
A workflow that spends Etsy's quota on what only Etsy knows, and the free history on the rest.
- Monday, before touching Etsy's tool: list the phrases you are considering and run each through the Keyword History Explorer. Drop anything whose five-year shape says it is out of season for the next two months, and anything falling year on year.
- Spend the 15 Etsy searches on the survivors. You want two numbers: is it searched, and how do searches compare with listings. Write both down with the date.
- For the two or three phrases you will actually build on, read page 1 logged out. Count the ads and the sub-100-review shops. If none of the small shops are there, pick the next phrase down.
- Write the listing with the phrase stated once in a title under 15 words and the variants across the 13 tags; a generated listing does this from a photo.
- Re-check in four weeks from a neutral vantage point, not your own browser. Etsy's tool will have forgotten your first reading; your notebook will not.