Google has released its “Year in Search” summary for 2025, revealing both the terms that spiked the most searches over the year across various categories, from News, to People, to Passings (deaths), Maps, and beyond, as well as the changes in how people are searching for information.
Bookstores
As a travel news website, Travel Tomorrow can report that in Maps and searched-for places, Google highlighted Bookstores, with 2025’s top three trending places listed as “Livraria Lello, Porto District, Portugal;” “Animate Ikebukuro main store, Tokyo, Japan;” and “El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
Porto district’s Livraria Lello, in the number one spot, is a highly photogenic store with an iconic red staircase, and is mistakenly associated with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Bookstore popularity is also reflected in other data across the year, including Time Out’s coolest neighbourhoods list, where historic book quarter Jimbōchō, Tokyo, took first place.
Transit
With overtourism in Japan in the news, it’s perhaps no surprise that Japan occupies four of the top five trending Transit searches: Kyoto Station, Nagoya Station, and Tokyo took first, second and third, and the run was only interrupted by the Parisian station, Gare de Lyon in fourth spot, before being rounded off by Hakata Station, in Fukuoka, Japan in fifth.
Botanical Gardens
Interest in parks and gardens also featured in the Google summary, revealing an interesting split between the UK and Asia in the top five trending places. Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Karnataka, India, sparked the most interest. A photographable oasis, featuring complex floral structures, Lalbagh also boasts a new Floating Gardens project that attracted debate this year. Gardens in Indonesia and Singapore also hit the top five, but the UK was mentioned twice in the list, thanks to its Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Eden Project, in the southwest of the country.
Musicians, influencers, crime, and news
Given the power of music gigs to drive travel, a mention here should go to the top trending musicians in 2025. Unfortunately, it is for macabre reasons that d4vd takes the number one place in the US ranking – after the dismembered body of a teenage girl was found in his Tesla. Recent Grammy nominees KATSEYE take second place, after recent reports that they have received “thousands” of death threats.
Similarly, demonstrating that old-fashioned news values related to death and violence still have the power to fascinate, the term that trended highest in the US in the year to 25 November 2025, in both “News” and “Passings” according to Google, was “Charlie Kirk,” the 31-year-old American political activist who was murdered at a Utah University event in September. The death of Ozzy Osborne, aka the “Prince of Darkness,” the British co-founder of heavy metal band Black Sabbath, ranked second in Passings, while “Iran” and “US government shutdown” ranked second and third in News, respectively.
Technology
Technology itself featured in Google’s trend ranking, with “Gemini” the most searched-for term globally in 2025, which Google claims shows “that AI has entered public conversation and daily use.” Gemini is Google’s multimodal AI model and assistant, which the tech firm says is capable of both comprehending and generating text, images, audio, and code. Named for the star sign and constellation with a “twin” nature, it can handle diverse inputs and work across Google products as a chatbot, content creator, and productivity tool.
The new AI capacities within Google also allowed people to ask their questions in more “conversational” ways. The firm says it “saw people asking, “What’s the deal with…” queries more than ever.” Going beyond closed “What is” type questions, more open-ended “searches using “Tell me about…” are up 70% year over year,” Google said, adding that “queries starting with “How do I…” reached an all-time high with a 25% increase from last year.”
