The short answer
"MDVR" scores 0.6 worldwide against 68.9 for "dash cam", and "video telematics" 0.7 in Britain against 56.4 for "dash cam installation". Both are correct words and neither is a word buyers type. Name the page after the job — fitting a camera — and keep the device class for the spec table.
Our catalogue used to open with the words “AI dashcams and MDVRs”. Both are correct, one of them is a word almost nobody types, and we only found out because we went and measured it instead of assuming. If you sell this hardware, the same measurement probably applies to your site too.
What we did
Google Trends, through a real browser, on 21 September 2026: 27 comparisons across 14 countries plus worldwide, alongside 34 live search-results pages. Trends gives no absolute volumes — a number is one term’s share relative to the biggest term inside the same comparison, and a 0.0 means “below Google’s reporting threshold”, not literally nobody. That is still enough to rank words against each other, which is all a headline needs.
The words
Worldwide, one comparison:
| dash cam | telematics | vehicle tracking | fleet camera | mdvr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 68.9 | 19.6 | 11.0 | 2.4 | 0.6 |
“MDVR” is a factory word. Its search geography is China (100), South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand — the places where these boxes are made and traded — and its biggest related query is “mdvr player”, people looking for the desktop app to open a recording. It belongs in a spec table, not in an H1.
Britain, the market with the deepest commercial tail in this category:
| dash cam installation | ai dash cam | fleet dash cam | video telematics | commercial vehicle camera |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 56.4 | 8.8 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 0.1 |
“Video telematics” is the phrase the whole industry — us included — uses in its decks. It scores 0.7 against 56.4 for people trying to get a camera fitted. It is not a bad phrase; it is an in-group phrase, and an in-group phrase in a page title is a page nobody outside the group finds.
The same product, four vocabularies
The word changes with the market, and translating the English one is the fastest way to find nothing:
- Britain and South Africa — “dash cam”, plus the installation tail: “dash cam installation near me”, “dash cam installation cost” (up 300 % in a year), “dash cam south africa”, “dash cam price”.
- Brazil — “câmera veicular” (67.8) and “rastreamento veicular” (64.7). Not “dvr veicular”, which scores 0.9 despite being the phrase on every distributor’s product page, and not “telemetria veicular” (1.1), whose only live tail is “o que é telemetria veicular” — a homework question.
- Spanish-speaking Latin America — “DVR móvil” is the right shop-floor word, with a brand tail out of the CCTV world: Hikvision, Dahua, Epcom, Meriva. But every B2B term there scores at or below 2.3 against 71 for consumer “dashcam”. That market is worked through distributors, not through articles.
- East Africa — the searched word is literally “wialon”. In Tanzania and Uganda it outranks both “vehicle tracking” and “fleet management”.
What we changed
The catalogue is now a fleet dash cam catalogue; the installation page leads with dash cam installation; the comparison hub is fleet dash cam brands compared. MDVR still appears — on the four- and eight-channel pages, in the specifications, next to JT/T 808 and JT/T 1078 — because the people who search for it are exactly the people who need it, and there are just not many of them.
Nothing about the products changed. A four-channel recorder is still a four-channel recorder. We simply stopped leading with the word that only the factory uses.
What you can take from it
If you resell this hardware under your own brand, run the same check before you write your pages — your market may differ from ours, and it costs an afternoon to find out rather than a year of wondering why the traffic never came. Three rules that survived our own measurement:
- Name the page after the thing the buyer wants done, not after the device class. “Dash cam installation” beats “video telematics solutions” by two orders of magnitude, which is why what a fitting involves is a page and “video telematics platform” is not.
- Keep the model numbers. In Mexico and Saudi Arabia the related searches are artefacts — JC400, JC450, AE-DC4328. Integrators search by part number, so every model deserves its own page with the exact number on it.
- Do not translate your keywords. Harvest them again in the local language; the Brazilian and Mexican vocabularies for the same box have nothing in common — the market-by-market breakdown has the rest of them.
The full dataset — 27 Trends comparisons and 34 results pages, country by country, with the raw JSON — is not public, but we will send it to anyone selling in these markets: ask us for it. It includes the numbers that contradicted what we ourselves had written three days earlier.
