The Year in Search Film, Social and Lists Data Methodology

Year in Search reveals the breakout questions, moments, and individuals the world searched for throughout the year.

This is how we analyse the data.

The Year in Search Lists

The lists for Year in Search 2025 represent the top trending queries. These are the queries that increased the fastest in search interest during 2025.

To determine these trends, we identify the search terms that saw the highest increase in traffic between January 1, 2025 and November 25, 2025, compared to the same period last year. By measuring the spike in interest rather than the total number of searches, we can identify the trends that were unique to 2025.

We do not base the lists on "most searched" terms because generic words like "weather" or "news" are popular every year and do not reflect what was unique about the year.

If sharing this data, please refer to these lists as "trending searches" and do not use phrases like "top searched" or "most searched," as that would be inaccurate.

Some list-specific details:

Searches list: These are the top trending searches overall, analysed using Google Trends internal tools, during the time period.

Passings list: These are people who died during the time period.

People list: These are the top trending people who were alive during the time period. It doesn’t cover those who have passed away.

News: These are the top trending search queries judged to have been related to news stories during the time period. The list is not exhaustive or encompassing of all news stories that happened but based on those that grew most in search interest during that time period.

Google Maps and Hum to Search lists: These are compiled from Google Maps and Google Hum to Search data, not from Google Trends. Maps data represents the top or most-searched. Hum to Search represents those that trended the most.

You can find out more about Google Trends here.

The Year in Search film

The Year in Search film is also rooted in Google Trends data and features a series of film clips based on “breakout” search queries. A “breakout” designation means a person, movement, topic, landmark or moment was searched at least 5,000% more in 2025 globally than in the previous year.

For example, being a “breakout lorem ipsum” means “lorem ipsum” grew by more than 5,000% this year.

All of the film clips used represent real breakout searches from 2025.However, the precise on-screen text queries are not breakout queries in every case, but are inspired or based on those we saw in 2025.

Local Year in Search (US only)

Local Year in Search highlights the top trending searches across US metropolitan areas in 2025.

These trending searches are terms with more search interest in 2025 compared to the previous year, using Google Trends data and Google’s internal tools

This local data encompasses all 210 U.S. designated market areas (DMAs), as defined by Nielsen, using Google Trends data from January 1, 2025 to November 25, 2025.