Chicago Fed, Report: UI Claims and Google Trends in the Post-Pandemic Era

“Taken together, the evidence presented here suggests that the relationship between initial UI claims and Google Trends has continued to hold post-pandemic. What does this imply for the current situation in which initial UI claims have increased but the Google Trends unemployment topic has not? While the two measures of labor market health do not always align, over time they do tend to follow the same trend. This makes the deviations that do occur of some interest and worthy of further study. While not particularly large, the current deviation is one such example. As the labor market recovery continues to evolve in 2023, in our view Google Trends remains an alternative data source worth watching closely.”