The Search Bar Confessional: America’s Google Searches

Autocomplete is the closest thing we have to a national diary. Start typing “how long can I” and Google finishes your sentence based on what everyone else has asked. Four of the top five are about the fridge. The fifth is about driving on a spare tire. These are people negotiating with consequences.

Then there's the social surveillance genre. Nearly 10,000 people a month want to know if someone can see that they screenshotted an Instagram story. Google's AI Overview says no, Instagram doesn't notify anyone. Google also surfaces the follow-up question “Will Instagram notify people if I screenshot their story in 2026?” So the anxiety renews every year, like a car registration.

And finally, the quiet ones. “Is it weird to go to a bar alone” gets about 1,000 searches a month. Concerts, movies and restaurants follow. No, it isn't weird. Yes, someone will look at you. That person is also alone.

About 49,500 times a month, someone asks Google whether Bigfoot is real. Google now answers with an AI Overview whose first word is “No.” This has not slowed anyone down. Searches are up 31% from a year ago.

Aliens lead the field at 135,000 a month, up 56%. Skinwalkers and ghosts tie at 60,500. Vampires, werewolves and wendigos are all slipping, which is the first good news the wendigos have had in a while.

The biggest jump belongs to the Backrooms, an internet horror legend about endless yellow office rooms. Searches for “is the Backrooms real” rose 157% in a year. That sounds like a movement. It was a movie. A24's Backrooms opened May 29, 2026. Searches peaked the next month and fell 76% by September.

Two more findings, because you've come this far. Mothman searches run at 2x a normal month every October. And when you map the questions by state, West Virginia ranks first for both Mothman and skinwalkers, third for Bigfoot and top ten for aliens and ghosts. West Virginia is not afraid of the unknown. It's just doing its homework.

We ran 70 everyday phrases through Google Trends, state by state, and found each state's most distinctive search: the thing it looks up far more than the typical state does.

Delaware searches “scrapple” at 33 times the national median. Louisiana searches “Mardi Gras” at 33 times. New Mexico searches “green chile” at 25 times, which seems low. Hawaii searches “hurricane tracker” at 25 times. Minnesota checks on ice fishing at 14 times, presumably from the ice.

Utah's most distinctive search is “church near me.” Kentucky's is “bowling,” and I'd like to believe that's the city of Bowling Green and not a lifestyle. I can't prove either.

We pulled every autocomplete suggestion for “can my dog eat” and “can dogs eat,” from A to Z. That's 512 different foods people are nervous about.

The most feared foods are bananas and strawberries, at 246,000 searches a month each. Bananas. The fruit that comes in its own packaging. Grapes, which can actually hurt a dog, get 110,000. The dog, for its part, would like you to know it once ate a sock and was fine.

Google showed an AI Overview on all 30 of the top dog questions, and the answers lined up with standard vet guidance. The sources are telling. The American Kennel Club was cited in 22 of them, Purina in 18 and PetMD in 13. So a dog food company is now the authority on whether your dog can eat food that isn't dog food. That's either a conflict of interest or very good marketing. Probably both.

In 2021, “egg prices” got about 3,600 searches a month. Then came two shocks. In January 2023 it hit 550,000. In February 2025 it hit 823,000. A country that had never once thought about the price of an egg suddenly thought of nothing else.

“Why are eggs so expensive” peaked at 673,000 in January 2023. Last month it got 320. Either eggs got cheaper or we gave up. The data can't tell you which. I can, but I won't.

The word “tariffs” went from around 50,000 searches a month to 5 million in April 2025. Beef had its turn in late 2025, when “beef prices” hit 40,500 in October. And the strangest one: “why is RAM so expensive now” went from about 10 searches a month to 74,000 in December 2025. Computer memory now costs enough that regular people noticed, which is a sentence I never expected to type.

In 2022, about ten people a month needed to type “is this AI” into Google. Last month, 201,000 did, an all-time high. They typed it into a search engine that now answers questions with AI. Nobody involved seems to have noticed the problem.

The rest of the AI mood board isn't sunny either. “AI slop” went from a few dozen searches to 74,000 a month. “AI bubble” peaked at 165,000 in November 2025. And “how to turn off AI overview” hit a record 22,200 last month, which is 22,200 people asking Google how to make Google stop.

One more: “is AI dangerous” jumped from 3,600 searches in August 2026 to 27,100 in September. I don't know what happened. I'm not going to ask the AI.

Here's the most searched term in the United States for every year from 2021 to 2025: “youtube.” Not a question. Not a problem to solve. Just the name of a website, typed into a different website, by a person who was already on the internet.

In 2025 alone, Americans searched for it an estimated 2.5 billion times. Facebook and Amazon fill out the podium most years. And in 2025, people searched Google for the word “google” roughly 1.5 billion times. I've thought about this for a while and I don't have anything to add. It's Google all the way down.

Strip out the brand names and one word wins every single year: weather. More than a billion searches a year, from a nation that owns windows.

The real mover is “restaurants near me.” It went from about 308 million searches in 2021 to nearly 1.2 billion in 2025. Americans have stopped deciding where to eat. We hand the decision to a phone, then argue with the phone.

For years, people typed “reddit” at the end of their searches to find real humans instead of SEO content. Google noticed. It now does that part for you.

We checked live results for 1,095 everyday queries across 11 categories. Reddit appeared in the top 10 for 65% of them, the top 3 for 47%, and the #1 spot for 13%. YouTube and Facebook were also everywhere, which tells you something about where Google thinks the answers live now.

Product reviews top the list at 85%, then gaming at 84%. Health comes last at 35%. So Google will let strangers on the internet pick your headphones, but not your blood pressure medication. That's fair. It may be the most reasonable decision on this entire page.

AI Overviews showed up on 95% of these queries, and about a third of those cited Reddit. The robot is reading Reddit too. Let's hope it's reading the good threads.

More people now skip Google and ask a chatbot. So we asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same 50 questions: “What are the 5 best [thing] to buy in 2026?”

They named the same #1 brand 23 times out of 50. At least two of them agreed on #1 in 43 cases. On average, three of the five brands showed up on all three lists. Perfect agreement came on standing desks, home security, smartwatches and 4K TVs.

Then we asked for the best streaming service, and they didn't share a single brand. ChatGPT said Netflix. Perplexity said HBO. Gemini said Apple. That's roughly how this question goes in every household in America, so in a sense, the AI has achieved human-level intelligence.

When the search engine answers the question itself, fewer people click. It's like a librarian who reads you the whole book out loud so you never check it out.

We tracked estimated Google traffic for 48 major websites from October 2025 to October 2026. The typical site fell 28.5%. Home, health and recipe publishers took the worst of it: bhg.com fell 66%, verywellhealth.com 63% and thespruce.com 55%. The winners were Facebook, up 56%, and, oddly, the recipe site Serious Eats, up 84%. Someone over there knows something.

Everything above is about what people search. This part is about what they get when they click. For a decade, website owners have been told page speed is a ranking factor, and an entire industry exists to shave milliseconds off load times.

So we ran Google's own speed test, Lighthouse, on the top 10 results for 50 of the queries above. 324 pages finished the test. The pages ranked #1 had the lowest median performance score of any group: 46 out of 100. Pages in spots 4 to 6 scored 57. Only about 1 in 20 of the #1 pages loaded their main content within Google's own 2.5-second target.

For what it's worth, about 50 people a month ask Google whether page speed affects SEO. Everyone else just installs a plugin.

Speed still matters to the human being waiting for your page to load. That person has feelings, or at least a back button. But in this sample, being fast clearly isn't what puts a page on top.

Search data gets more fun when you zoom in. Take Cooperstown, New York, population roughly “one Main Street.” Searches for Cooperstown Dreams Park, the youth baseball complex, are about 10 times higher in June than in December. The Hall of Fame and local lodging both peak in July. The whole town's internet presence follows a Little League schedule.

Now drones. In a normal month, about 30 Americans search for “drone sightings.” In December 2024, when New Jersey residents started reporting mysterious drones overhead, that number hit 450,000. “Can I shoot down a drone” went from about 110 searches to 2,400 that month. The answer is no. Drones count as aircraft under federal law. Please put the shotgun down and go back inside.