It's finally that time of year again as the roundups are starting to roll out, and while most of the attention might be on your Spotify recaps and shopping habits, one of the most fascinating reveals is what Americans were searching for most throughout 2025.
Google has been the de facto 'welcome mat' of the internet for several decades now, and while certain artificial intelligence tools have begun to threaten its dominance to the point where Google itself has added unpopular new features, the search engine has remained on top for many.
It's where you typically head to check the weather, go shopping, find a website, or even ask it some rather embarrassing questions, and billions of people doing that across the globe creates some rather intriguing data.
While you can obviously use Google's own Trending data tracker for day-to-day analysis, there's nothing quite like a year-end summary to see what really captured the attention of the world in 2025, and there are some unexpected results when you look specifically at the United States.
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It shouldn't be too surprising to find out that far-right political commentator Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in September, was the single most searched entity of the year despite his death only happening three months ago, and both his alleged assassin Tyler Robinson and wife Erika Kirk were named the second and fourth most-searched people of the year.
Kirk's assassination was trumped in a news perspective by both the government shutdown and President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, presumably with a lot of traffic coming from people trying to actually understand what was going on in the first place.
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was the highest trending person, but coming in third place after the aforementioned Robinson was another individual in conversation with the law, as singer 'D4vd', real name David Anthony Burke, was the subject of countless searches as a young girl's body was found in his Tesla.
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Looking towards the world of entertainment, Google revealed that Pedro Pascal was the most-searched actor of the year, presumably due to being in three major films this year and the release of the second season of The Last of Us and his rather notable role in that.
KPop Demon Hunters was the most-searched film of the year while simultaneously holding the runner-up spot in total trending searches, and fellow Netflix drama The Hunting Wives claimed the top spot for TV.
While Taylor Swift was nowhere to be seen in the trending musicians chart, her song 'Wood' was the most searched of the year, perhaps due to its rather obvious double entendre that captured the attention of many.
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If you're looking for a quiet bookstore to browse next year then you might want to avoid Powell's City of Books in Portland as that was the most popular in terms of Google searches in 2025, and the same was true for Ginnie Springs Outdoors in Florida when it comes to campgrounds.