Gemini is the number one trending search term for Google in 2025, based on the company’s Year in Search report, highlighting just how quickly users have embraced generative AI — and more specifically Google’s assistant and model family. The designations mark the fastest growing query on a global scale over the past year, not the most searched term overall, and indicate continued swells of curiosity propelled by new features, product integrations, and an ongoing sentient-family-reunion scuffle over AI’s place in search.
Why Gemini dominated Google searches worldwide in 2025
It was a mix of forces that converged to lift Gemini up. Google then re-centered its AI strategy under the Gemini brand for consumer and enterprise products, putting it in front of billions of people via Android, the Google app, and Workspace tools. It was the real-world on-ramp for new users, thanks to its multimodal features (text, images, code, long documents), and advanced users explored its support of long-context workflows and developer hooks.
High-visibility moments amplified interest. Embedding Gemini into daily activities (for writing support, image analysis, code help) was a source of frequent reminders to “look it up.” Yet high-profile conversations about AI in search, focused particularly on the quality of AI-created overviews, have grounded Google’s approach in public conversation as well. Interest spikes often trail controversy as much as product debuts, a pattern long evident in Google Trends information.
What Google considers a trending search in Year in Search
Google’s Year in Search is focused on queries that had the largest sustained traffic spikes over a sustained period in 2019 as compared to 2018, not merely terms that enjoyed moments of spiked interest this year, like “weather.” That system benefits momentum and cultural impact. And in that context, Gemini’s rise is joined by other fast-movers like certain major sporting events and political figures — “India vs England” and “Charlie Kirk” are also among the top risers, for example — along with another China-based chatbot, DeepSeek, which has made the top 10. The mix reflects the combination of entertainment, foiled geopolitical games, and technology that defined the year’s search habits.
Curiosity Cycle Fueled by AI Competition
Gemini’s rise didn’t occur in isolation. Customers have started to trade assistants — Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and others — according to accuracy, speed, price and enterprise guardrails. That kind of comparison shopping creates search volume: people ask how to use Gemini, if it’s available in their country and language, how it does at coding tasks and how it compares with rivals. The mention of DeepSeek in the list of this year’s climbers serves as a reminder that AI competition — and not just search — is itself a catalyst for search.
Industry researchers also have reported increased everyday chatbot usage domestically and internationally, with surveys from institutions like Pew Research Center and Forrester detailing steady gains in awareness and trial. The more and more workplace (and classroom) tasks intersect with AI — even in a casual way — the obvious points of search follow, from onboarding questions to troubleshooting cues.
The Spike Approaches; the Product Shifts Behind It
Google’s efforts to make Gemini the default assistant layer to most of its ecosystem are a game-changer. The model family provides a foundation for features in Workspace, fuels creative and analytical tasks and increasingly appears on phones as a front door to AI. What’s more, the move away from brand experimentation and towards product standardization enabled consumers to non-disruptively learn just one name that they can easily remember, rather than a fragmented set of names that decimate query volume.
Technical milestones mattered too. Long-context processing, multimodal inputs and tighter integrations with search and mobile services led to clear, relatable use cases — summarization of PDFs, composition of emails, planning for trips or explainer sets for code inference or image generation. Each of those use cases is itself a search, multiplying total momentum.
Search and strategy implications of Gemini’s 2025 surge
Being the year’s top trending term is more than a branding victory. It’s an indication that Google has also managed to focus the public’s attention on its AI layer precisely when search is in trouble. Publishers, marketers and app developers are already involved in fine-tuning for an AI-first discovery path — expecting possibly queries such as “Gemini vs ChatGPT,” or “how to use Gemini with Docs,” or even something like “best prompts for Gemini” — with that information fueling content strategies on these new types of platforms.
For Google, the lesson is strategic clarity: The assistant is the product. Expect to see more consolidation of features under the Gemini umbrella, deeper integration with search experiences, and more regional rollouts. For people doing the asking, the trend reinforces a new normal in which the first step to solving any task is often “ask the model,” and where — fittingly — one of the first stops to learn how is Google Search.
A popular trending term, as we’ve come to see with Google Trends’ Year in Search, is just as much a cultural moment captured as it is a product milestone reached. This year, this moment belonged to Gemini.
