Google's annual Year in Search campaign reflects on the year’s biggest trends and moments. In 2025, the theme of “reimagination” not only encapsulated the trends we saw in the world, but also applied to the ways people searched for those trends on Google.
For the first time, it was important not just to reflect the changes in the world, but also to honestly reflect the transformational change in Search behavior. Every asset that was produced for the campaign was carefully crafted to reflect the new, more conversational way of Searching. From the language of the queries themselves to the central design of the Search bar.
Building on the success of 2024’s integrated campaign, we went even deeper this year to tell a platform-specific Year in Search story across every face of Google. Staring with the Year in Search Doodle on the Google homepage that led tens of millions of viewers to our longform hero film on YouTube. On social, we created dozens of fandom-centric films which garnered millions of views. We worked with content creators to present categories of trends on Tiktok with bespoke videos that brought Trends to new audiences. And we compiled hundreds of custom Trends Lists in more than 70 countries, which were distributed with major news outlets around the world.
In 2025, a paradox emerged: as AI made information more accessible than ever, the world craved deeper "human" connection. Google Search data revealed a fundamental shift from finding facts to finding feeling. We saw a rise in "nuanced curiosity," where users moved away from static keywords toward conversational, contextual questions that reflected their personal hopes, anxieties, and fandom obsessions. People weren’t just searching for global events; they were searching for their place within them, turning data points into hyper-personal community stories.
To honor this shift, our strategy for Year in Search 2025 was to "humanize the data," evolving the campaign from a top-down hero film into a fan-centric, bottom-up ecosystem. We met our audiences on YouTube and TikTok with "Fan Cuts" and platform-native content that repositioned the fans searching as the protagonists of every trend. By leaning into the conversational nature of the new AI-powered Search, we reframed the annual review as a global dialogue rather than the usual corporate annual review. The final work highlighted a fundamental truth: a subject only rises to the limelight because of the collective curiosity of the people searching for it. Ultimately, the story of 2025 wasn't just what was searched—it was the passionate fans whose curiosity defined the cultural pulse.
Given our theme was reimagination, our challenge was to reimagine and evolve Year in Search while still retaining the core DNA of the campaign people have come to know and love. The answer was a global shift in how we depicted the search bar across every element in the campaign. Rather than the closed search bar we’ve always used, for the first time we showed the search bar as a living thing, animated in a spectrum of colors and growing with the text inside.
We made sure that each query represented the new ways people were searching. By starting and ending our film with a single story of one person’s quest, we were able to wrap the entire film in the idea of a continued conversation, intimate and specific as it was a sweeping summary of the year. Our fandom-focused cuts also featured conversational questioning and back and forth moments between users and Search, while keeping the spotlight squarely on the trendsetters themselves.
To present viral trends like “gen z stare”and “touching grass”, we partnered with content creators who lived and breathed these trends over the year. First we grouped trends into categories including “It’s Giving” (fashion trends) “Millennial Pause” (gen z trends) and “Touching Grass” (IRL trends). Then we selected creators with vested interest in these trends, to share each category via collab posts. The result was a series of short films made especially for Tiktok that got whole communities reflecting back on the top trends that meant the most to them.
By weaving together dynamic design, a more intimate narrative structure, an original score of an iconic track from the year (Golden from K-Pop Demon Hunters), we pushed the boundaries of what fans expect from this campaign.
With 1.6B video views across platforms, the campaign became the most-viewed Year in Search yet and Google’s most positive brand moment of 2025. Driven by the YIS Doodle, the long-form film became the #1 most viewed YT video for @Google YT in 2025.
The campaign broke into culture, with 152K+ mentions on social and 3.2K press hits globally. Our behind the scenes story was feature in Fast Company and Trends trends List were featured in relevant publications like Complex, Chartdata, Pop Crave, JustJared, Yaseen That Guy, LadBible, CocinaconRicardo, Famitsu.
We also got high-profile organic shares from Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter, and Dolly Parton, alongside direct engagement from Doechii and creators in the film.
