Is anyone searching for a robot hedge trimmer?

Five years of Google searches say robot mowers are mainstream and robot hedge trimmers barely exist as an idea. That gap is the whole opportunity.

We build a game about a hedge trimmer that flies. Before anyone spends real money making one, it’s worth asking a dull question: does anybody want it? The cheapest answer is Google.

Two things stand out. Robot mowers are a settled category: the searches come back every April like clockwork and the peaks are getting higher. And the manual hedge trimmer is searched for just as much, because hedges don’t cut themselves and nobody has sold a machine that does it yet.

The niche on its own scale

Put “robot hedge trimmer” on the same chart as robot mowers and it reads as zero. That’s not a rounding error. Here it is measured against itself:

The spikes are the tell. A line that sits at zero and jumps to 100 for one week is a handful of people, probably reacting to a video or a product launch, then nothing. There is no steady demand because there is no product to search for. In 2015 “robot lawn mower” looked like this too.

Where the mowers are

Robot mowers win where grass grows all year, lawns are small, and labour is expensive. That’s Ireland, New Zealand and Britain. It’s the same list you’d write for hedges: privet, laurel and leylandii thrive in exactly the climates where people are already paying robots to cut grass.

What we take from it

• The mower market did the hard work. It taught a few million households that a garden robot is normal. A hedge robot doesn’t have to explain itself, only prove it won’t fall off.
• The search gap is an opening, not a warning. Nobody searched for robot mowers until they could buy one. Demand follows the product.
• The first customers are findable. They live in wet, small-lawn countries and already own a robot mower.

We’ll re-pull this data every quarter and keep this page updated. If the flat line ever starts to climb, you’ll see it here first.