Google's Year in Search 2025: The most interesting part is how we searched

Google's annual review of search trends is here, and while the most popular keywords and queries in 2025 won't surprise you, the way we searched this year underlines a huge shift in our online behavior.

Yes, the "trending" searches this year are, unsurprisingly, topped by topics such as Charlie Kirk's assassination, the election of Pope Leo XIV, and (chuckles) Google's own AI assistant Gemini.

Notably, these aren't the most popular terms that were searched on Google; instead, Google says the "lists on the Year in Search 2025 Trends website represent the top trending queries, which are the searches that had the highest spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2025 as compared to 2024."

As the company pointed out, with Gemini being baked into Google Search, people started asking questions in more conversational ways. One popular example, according to the company, was “What’s the deal with 6-7," a query which I, myself, have typed into Google at least once this year.

Google also said that more complex queries became more popular this year, with searches for “Tell me about…” being up 70 percent year over year, and searches starting with “How do I…” increasing 25 percent compared to last year.

Check out the entire Google Year in Search 2025 report on the website.