Year in Search 2025: Moving at the speed of culture
This behaviour is happening at an extraordinary rate: Google gets over 5 trillion searches around the world annually,1 giving marketers unparalleled visibility into emerging intent.
Across sport, entertainment and retail, the same behaviour emerged: cultural moments triggered immediate spikes in Search. Fans searched for fixtures for the Women’s Euros and England’s men’s cricket series. Glastonbury performances fuelled contextual search spikes. The suspense of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors sent people looking for when the next episode would air.
But what defined 2025 wasn’t just how much people searched but how they searched, with longer, more conversational, more complex queries on the rise.
People are now searching the way they speak in real life, using natural language to explore, understand and get richer answers, not just short keywords to complete a task. As queries become broader and more expressive, Search captures intent earlier, surfacing emerging purchase considerations. For marketers, this creates a clearer window into emerging demand and the moment when cultural interest starts to turn commercial.
1. The Oasis spike: When culture moves faster than product cycles
2025 was the year culture moved at speed, and people moved with it. From surprise reunions to viral micro-trends, every moment triggered a surge of curiosity as people turned to Search not just to follow events but to make sense of them.
Richard Dunton, Dentsu
AI-powered matching interprets emerging queries instantly, including demand you cannot forecast.
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Major cultural occasions like the Oasis reunion generated huge surges in attention. Oasis were the number one trending male music act in the UK in 2025. But the bigger opportunity lies in the ripple effect that spreads outward. Fans searched for more than just concert tickets. They looked for bucket hats, classic Adidas trainers and last-minute travel.
The commercial impact was clear. JD Sports saw a 913% month-on-month increase in Oasis-related searches. This surge signalled not only heightened interest, but an immediate shift in purchase readiness across fashion and accessories. Online marketplace Faire recorded a 150% year-on-year uplift in UK sales for Oasis-themed products, with bucket hat sales alone rising 275%.
Increasingly, responding at this pace depends on AI. As Dentsu product partner Richard Dunton notes, “AI-powered matching interprets emerging queries instantly, including demand you cannot forecast.”
He points to the Wicked: For Good film release to illustrate the challenge. Searches for its release date ranked among the UK’s top 10 ‘When is…?’ queries, signalling intense early interest. At the same time, the retail client Dentsu supported had a product range that was evolving quickly with no certainty about which items would launch and when.
Rather than trying to predict demand, the team built a setup able to adapt in real time. AI-powered keyword matching and Dynamic Search Ads automatically connected emerging queries to the most relevant landing pages as products came online. When buzz peaked, traffic rose to over 25 times normal levels, capturing demand without perfect foresight.
Together, these behaviours highlight a strategic truth: culture now moves faster than product cycles, and marketers win when their setups flex in real time rather than rely solely on predictions.
2025 proved that as fandom intensifies, commercial intent follows. Early searches around sporting moments often centred on logistics, like how to watch or where to stream, but as excitement built, people moved quickly from viewing to shopping.
Spikes in queries for ‘England shirt’ during the Women’s Euros, and a surge in interest for ‘tennis trainers’ during Wimbledon, illustrate how quickly inspiration on screen translates to action in the Search bar. This was demonstrated even more vividly when a viral ‘strawberry dress’ moment at the tournament, amplified by celebrity and influencer appearances, sent searches soaring and transformed a niche fashion moment into mass shopping intent.
Visual search is accelerating this shift from watching to wanting. Lens queries are one of the fastest growing types of Search, with more than 25 billion queries per month,2 and one in five Google Lens searches shows commercial intent.3 As Lens and Circle to Search become embedded in behaviour, people expect instant shoppability: if they see it, they can buy it. Visual inspiration is no longer the start of discovery, it is the start of conversion.
This raises the creative bar. High-quality, current visual assets are now as critical as text metadata, and they must be ready the moment intent appears. For brands, that means ensuring product imagery, feeds and dynamic assets can be activated automatically through tools such as Performance Max and
AI Max, which respond in real time to visually triggered demand and close the gap between inspiration and action.
Google’s Scott Sinclair, head of Search UK, notes that brands shouldn’t focus solely on visibility around big tentpole moments. “Visibility is vanity if it doesn’t convert. What matters is showing up exactly when intent peaks with an offer that lands. If your creative, inventory and bidding strategies aren't aligned with real-time signals, you might be part of the conversation, but you won't capture the sale.”
2. The sports surge: Capturing the shift from watching to wanting
This year, several viral moments became global retail phenomena, often within days rather than weeks. Search surfaced these early signals long before mainstream coverage.
Hot honey became the most searched food trend globally, with UK demand helping push it onto supermarket shelves and into limited-edition products such as a hot honey Jaffa Cake.
Collectibles followed a similar path. Labubu, one of the year’s breakout toy trends, drove people to Search, not only to shop but to verify authenticity. That growing curiosity translated quickly into sales. Labubu’s parent brand,
Pop Mart, reported a 700% year-on-year sales increase in Europe.
These examples underline how Search connects cultural and viral moments to real-world business impact. By answering critical questions around authenticity, availability and where to buy, Search gives people the confidence to act, turning fleeting interest into sustained commercial revenue.
As Sinclair puts it, “Speed is the new currency. AI-powered creative tools and AI Max let marketers move from months of planning to moments of execution. This allows brands to ride the wave of culture in real time and turn viral curiosity into revenue before the trend fades.”
3. The viral wave: Acting on early signals of demand
The acceleration of culture, intent and AI-powered discovery is reshaping how marketers understand and act on real-time demand.
People are expressing intent in more nuanced ways, revealing not only what they want but why. As these signals diversify, brands gain sharper visibility into emerging needs and the precise moments when people are primed to act.
In this environment, the best ads serve as answers: timely, relevant and appearing at the moment intent forms. The marketers who succeed will be those who can interpret these signals early and allow AI to act on them instantly, not by predicting the future but by being structurally ready for whatever emerges.
Looking ahead, the brands that thrive will follow a clear set of principles:
● Treat Search as the early signal of cultural and commercial momentum, using it to understand where attention is shifting before the market becomes saturated or competitors catch on.
● Design content and creative ecosystems for AI-driven discovery so your brand is helpful, trustworthy and ready to surface wherever a journey begins.
● Plan for volatility by building systems that adapt automatically to shorter trend cycles and sharper spikes, reducing dependence on forecast-led planning.
● Combine automation with human judgement, allowing AI to interpret emerging queries, scale creative and capture surges, while teams set the strategy, context and brand direction.
● Anchor creative, inventory and bidding decisions in real-time intent so that when demand peaks, the most relevant message and product appear instantly.
In 2026, the brands that win will interpret intent as it forms, respond with precision and use AI to turn every moment of cultural curiosity into meaningful action.
Visit the Year in Search website to revisit the biggest moments, searches and stories that defined 2025.
Preparing for 2026: When intent, culture and AI converge
1 Google Internal Data, Jan. 2025.
2 Google Internal Data, April 2025.
3 Google Internal Data, April 2025.
Scott Sinclair, Google
Visibility is vanity if it doesn’t convert. What matters is showing up exactly when intent peaks with an offer that lands.
Year in Search 2025: Moving at the speed of culture
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