Let me Google that for you – Measuring firm internationalization using Google Trends

In this research note, we propose Google Trends as a uniquely versatile and overlooked resource for International Business scholarship. Google search measures have been used successfully in other disciplines like epidemiology, finance, and political science. It offers highly reliable and finely grained data that not only provide a market-side complement to accounting based measures of firm internationalization in IB. Additionally, it opens entirely new research questions for IB research. In this research note, we survey the use of Google Trends in academic research, propose Google Trends-based measures of firm internationalization, discuss their empirical and conceptual benefits (and drawbacks) for IB research. We also provide an introduction to the R package globaltrends (Puhr, 2020) that accompanies this research note.