Key Insights
Essential data points from our research
Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day, providing the raw data for Google Trends
Google Trends analyzes a portion of the 1.2 trillion searches conducted worldwide per year
Approximately 15% of the daily queries processed by Google are searches that have never been seen before
Searches for "near me" have grown by over 150% in recent years indicating local intent
50% of people are more likely to click on a brand name if that brand shows up more than once in results
14.1% of searches use a question phrasing like "how to" or "what is"
Organic search drives 53.3% of all website traffic
Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate
49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel
"Wordle" was the most searched term globally in 2022
In 2020 "Coronavirus" was the top trending search globally
In 2023 "War in Israel and Gaza" was the top news trend globally
Google Discover (formerly Feed) uses search history to serve content to 800 million monthly users
Google Lens is used for over 10 billion searches per month via visual recognition
BERT technology affects 10% of all searches to better understand context
Business & Marketing Usage
- 1Organic search drives 53.3% of all website traffic
- 2Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate
- 349% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel
- 4Google Ads average click-through rate across all industries is 3.17%
- 5Use of Google Trends for keyword research allows identification of seasonal spikes
- 676% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day
- 7Long-tail keywords (3+ words) make up 70% of search traffic
- 860% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the "click to call" option in search
- 9Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic via search than those that don't
- 10The average cost per click (CPC) in Google Ads is roughly $2.69 for search
- 1175% of users never scroll past the first page of search results
- 12Google Shopping ads account for 76% of retail search ad spend
- 13Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content can increase organic traffic by 106%
- 1443.6% of internet users worldwide visit Google to research products before buying
- 15Trends data is essential for "Newsjacking" strategies in content marketing
- 1628% of local searches result in a purchase
- 17Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search results than plain text
- 1898% of searchers choose a business that is on page 1 of the results
- 19Including a video in a post increases organic traffic from search results by 157%
- 2089% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine
Interpretation
Think of Google as the world's busiest storefront: organic search already drives over half of all traffic, delivers the best ROI and stronger close rates, rewards long-tail keywords, refreshed blog posts and video-rich content, and turns mobile and local searches into quick visits, while paid ads and shopping bids chew budget with modest CTRs and average CPCs, so ranking on page one and timing content with trends is how you actually catch the 89% of buyers who start with a search.
Historical Trends Data
- 1"Wordle" was the most searched term globally in 2022
- 2In 2020 "Coronavirus" was the top trending search globally
- 3In 2023 "War in Israel and Gaza" was the top news trend globally
- 4The search term "resume" typically peaks in January every year
- 5In 2016 "Pokémon Go" was the most searched term globally
- 6"Disney Plus" was the top trending search in the US in 2019
- 7"Robin Williams" was the top trending global search in 2014 following his death
- 8Searches for "sourdough bread" reached an all-time high in April 2020
- 9"Barbie" was the top trending movie search in 2023 globally
- 10During the 2016 US Election "Donald Trump" was the most searched person
- 11The iPhone 7 was the top trending consumer tech search in 2016
- 12"Dalgona coffee" was the top trending recipe in 2020
- 13In 2018 "World Cup" was the top trending search globally
- 14The search term "NFT" saw a breakout spike of over 1000% in 2021
- 15In 2017 "Hurricane Irma" was the number one global search
- 16"Squid Game" was the top trending TV show in 2021
- 17In 2013 "Nelson Mandela" was the most searched term globally
- 18Searches for "how to help Ukraine" spiked in early 2022
- 19Between 2004 and 2023 the term "Facebook" dominates social media search volume history
- 20"What is love" is historically the most searched "what is" question of all time
Interpretation
Taken together, Google Trends from 2004 to 2023 reads like a global mood ring, showing that people turned to searches for survival and solidarity during pandemics and wars, for escapism in viral games and shows, for comfort in baking and coffee during lockdowns, for shopping and tech fads, for seasonal self-improvement with January resume spikes, for moments of collective mourning, and for existential curiosity with "what is love" topping all other questions.
Platform & Technology
- 1Google Discover (formerly Feed) uses search history to serve content to 800 million monthly users
- 2Google Lens is used for over 10 billion searches per month via visual recognition
- 3BERT technology affects 10% of all searches to better understand context
- 4RankBrain (AI) is one of the top 3 ranking signals for Google Search results
- 564.91% of searches on Google resulted in zero-clicks in 2020 (highlighting instant answers/snippets)
- 6Google Search Console provides the backend data that often correlates with Trends findings for webmasters
- 7Google Trends offers a "Realtime Search Trends" feature covering the last 24 hours
- 8Mobile devices account for 58% of all organic search engine visits in the US
- 9Google Maps data is integrated into search to provide "busyness" trends for locations
- 10The "Hummingbird" algorithm update allowed Google to process conversational search queries better
- 11Google Trends provides an API (unofficially supported) for Python developers to scrape data
- 12Google's "Multisearch" allows users to search with both text and images simultaneously
- 13Featured Snippets (position zero) appear in 12.3% of search queries affecting click distribution
- 14Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) load 85% faster than standard mobile pages from search
- 15The "Knowledge Graph" contains over 500 billion facts impacting how Trends groups entities
- 16Google Trends filters allow isolation of "Image Search" data specifically
- 17"Passage Indexing" affects 7% of search queries identifying specific passages within a page
- 18Google's mobile-first indexing means the mobile version of a site determines ranking
- 19YouTube (owned by Google) is the second largest search engine processing 3 billion searches a month
- 20Google Assistant runs on more than 1 billion devices driving voice search data into Trends
Interpretation
Google has become a hyper-observant librarian that tracks 800 million monthly feeds, interprets over 10 billion Lens queries a month, and uses BERT, RankBrain, Hummingbird and a massive Knowledge Graph to deliver conversational, multimodal and mobile-first answers so efficiently that roughly 65% of searches never need a click, turning Search Console, Trends and realtime APIs into mandatory survival tools for webmasters.
Search Scale & Volume
- 1Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day, providing the raw data for Google Trends
- 2Google Trends analyzes a portion of the 1.2 trillion searches conducted worldwide per year
- 3Approximately 15% of the daily queries processed by Google are searches that have never been seen before
- 4Google holds over 91% of the global search engine market share furnishing the Trends database
- 5Google Trends data reflects activity from over 1 billion monthly active users on Google Search
- 6On average, a google search generates 0.2g of CO2, a metric tracked alongside data center efficiency
- 7Google indexes hundreds of billions of webpages which feed into the results tracked by Trends
- 8Provide real-time data which is updated as searches happen on Google
- 9The search volume for "Google" on Bing is consistently high often ranking in top global queries
- 10Google Trends history extends back to 2004 allowing for multi-decade data analysis
- 11There are over 99,000 searches on Google every single second contributing to Trends data
- 12Google Images constitutes roughly 20% of all queries generated across Google properties
- 13The size of the Google Search index is over 100,000,000 gigabytes
- 1463% of Google's US organic search traffic originates from mobile devices
- 15Google Trends allows comparison of up to 5 search terms simultaneously
- 16Data in Google Trends is normalized on a scale of 0 to 100 based on topic proportion
- 17Brazil is one of the top five countries for daily time spent on Google Search
- 18Google Search is available in 149 languages affecting the linguistic diversity of Trends data
- 19The term "weather" is consistently one of the highest volume daily searches globally
- 20Google sites visited by 270 million unique visitors in the US alone in a single month
Interpretation
Think of Google Trends as a relentlessly curious, slightly eco-conscious librarian: it distills real-time, normalized signals from over 8.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion a year, drawing on a 100,000,000+ gigabyte index of hundreds of billions of pages in 149 languages and data from more than 1 billion monthly searchers (with over 99,000 searches every second and 15 percent of queries never seen before), while reflecting Google’s 91 percent market dominance, the 63 percent mobile share of US organic traffic, the 20 percent contribution of Google Images, months of 270 million unique US visitors, trends traceable back to 2004, and even the roughly 0.2 grams of CO2 per search—together making Trends an indispensable mirror of global curiosity and a sober reminder of the internet’s scale and impact.
User Search Behavior
- 1Searches for "near me" have grown by over 150% in recent years indicating local intent
- 250% of people are more likely to click on a brand name if that brand shows up more than once in results
- 314.1% of searches use a question phrasing like "how to" or "what is"
- 4The average user makes 3-4 searches per day on Google
- 5Approximately 8% of search queries are phrased as questions
- 6"Best" + "right now" mobile searches have grown by over 125% in the last two years
- 727% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile affecting query syntax in Trends
- 8Users are 5X more likely to leave a site if it isn't mobile-friendly after a search
- 9The average length of a Google search query is 3 words
- 1065% of people use their phone in their "I want to buy" moments
- 1146% of all Google searches have local intent looking for local information
- 1292.96% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Maps, and Images combined
- 1320% of mobile queries on the Google App are voice searches
- 14The top 3 Google search results get 75.1% of all clicks
- 15Searches for "open now" have tripled in the past two years
- 1653% of users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load after clicking a search result
- 17Users revisit Google Search for the same query 10% of the time due to dissatisfaction
- 1870% of mobile searchers call a business directly from Google Search results
- 19Searches for "grocery delivery" grew 900% during the pandemic era
- 2039% of purchasers were influenced by a relevant search
Interpretation
Treat modern search like a mobile, local and impatient shopper: short, question-tinged and often voiced queries such as "near me" up 150%, "best right now" up 125%, "open now" tripling and "grocery delivery" up 900% create clear purchase intent that rewards repeated brand visibility and the top three results with 75.1% of clicks, so businesses must be fast, mobile-friendly and intent-focused or risk being ignored by roughly 92.96% of traffic coming from Google where users make 3 to 4 searches a day, call directly 70% of the time, abandon slow pages after three seconds and are five times more likely to leave non-mobile sites.
