Google released its annual list of top search trends for 2025  — with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history ranked among this year’s most searched news topics online.

Google’s annual “Year in Search” report is a window into what Americans have been thinking about over the past year, from breaking news to pop culture trends.

Kirk was the top search overall in the U.S. The 31-year-old right-wing political activist and influential voice for young conservatives died in September after he was shot in the neck during a Turning Point USA event in Utah Valley University. His wife, Erika, who took over as chairman and CEO of Turning Point USA, was also named one of the top-searched people on Google. 

Erika Kirk made headlines when she forgave her husband’s killer during remarks at his memorial service, which drew thousands to State Farm Stadium in Arizona, including the president. She will join CBS for a one-hour town hall event moderated by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss on Saturday, Dec. 13, at 8 p.m. ET on CBS. The appearance comes days after the anticipated release of “Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life,” a guide to recharging and connecting with your faith and family, written by her late husband.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was another top name searched this year after he defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. The 34-year-old democratic socialist will make history as the city’s first Muslim mayor.

Americans were also looking for regular updates on the historic 43-day-long government shutdown, which disrupted air travel and left thousands of workers without paychecks. Mr. Trump signed a bill in November to fund the government through Jan. 30.

Here is a roundup of some of the top Google searches in the U.S. in 2025:

Top Searches

• Charlie Kirk
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Labubu
• iPhone 17
• One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Top News

• One Big Beautiful Bill Act
• Government shutdown
• Charlie Kirk assassination
• Tariffs 
• No Kings protest

People

• Zohran Mamdani
• Tyler Robinson
• D4vd
• Erika Kirk
• Pope Leo XIV

Passings

• Charlie Kirk
• Gene Hackman
• Ozzy Osbourne 
• Anne Burrell 
• Diane Keaton

Google on Wednesday unveiled a new line-up of Pixel smartphones injected with another dose of artificial intelligence that’s designed to do everything from fetch vital information stored on the devices to help improve photos as they’re being taken.

The AI expansion on the four Pixel 10 models amplifies Google’s efforts to broaden the use of a technology that is already starting to reshape society. At the same time, Google is taking a swipe at Apple’s Achilles’ heel on the iPhone.

Apple so far has only been able to introduce a few basic AI features on the iPhone while failing to deliver on last year’s promise to deliver a more conversational and versatile version of its often-blundering virtual assistant Siri.

Without mentioning the iPhone by name, Google has already been mocking Apple’s missteps in online ads promoting the four new Pixel models as smartphones loaded with AI technology that consumers won’t have to wait for more than a year to arrive.

Google, in contrast, has been steadily increasing the amount of AI that it began to implant on its Pixels since 2023, with this year’s models taking it to another level.

Taking advantage of a more advanced processor, Google is introducing a new AI feature on the Pixel 10 phones called “Magic Cue” that’s designed to serve as a digital mind reader that automatically fetches information stored on the devices and displays the data at the time it’s needed. For instance, if a Pixel 10 user is calling up an airline, Magic Cue is supposed to instantaneously recognize the phone number and display the flight information if it’s in Gmail or a Google Calendar.

The Pixel 10 phones will also come with a preview feature of a new AI tool called “Camera Coach” that will automatically suggest the best framing and lighting angle as the lens is being aimed at a subject. Camera Coach will also recommend the best lens mode to use for an optimal picture.

The premium models — Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL — will also include a “Super Res” option that deploys a grab bag of software and AI tricks to zoom up to 100 times the resolution to capture the details of objects located miles away from the camera. The AI wizardry could happen without users even realizing it’s happening, making it even more difficult to know whether an image captured in a photo reflects how things really looked at the time a picture was taken or was modified by technology.

Google is also offering a free one-year subscription to its AI Pro plan to anyone who buys the more expensive Pixel 10 Pro or Pixel 10 Pro XL models in hopes of hooking more people on the Gemini toolkit it has assembled to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The prices on all four Pixel 10 models will remain unchanged from last year’s Pixel 9 generation, with the basic starting at $800 and the Pro selling for $1,000, the Pro XL at $1,200 and a foldable version at $1,800. All the Pixel 10s expect the foldable model will be in stores on August 28. The Pixel 10 Pro Fold will be available starting October 9.

Although the Pixel smartphone remains a Lilliputian next to the Gulliverian stature of the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy models, Google’s ongoing advances in AI while holding the line on its marquee devices raise the competitive stakes.

“In the age of AI, it is a true laboratory of innovation,” Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson said of the Pixel.

Apple, in particular, will be facing more pressure than usual when it introduces the next-generation iPhone next month. Although the company has already said the smarter Siri won’t be ready until next year at the earliest, Apple will still be expected to show some progress in AI to demonstrate the iPhone is adapting to technology’s AI evolution rather than tilting toward gradual obsolescence. Clinging to a once-successful formula eventually sank the BlackBerry and its physical keyboard when the iPhone and its touch screen came along nearly 20 years ago.

Apple’s pricing of the next iPhone will also be under the spotlight, given that the devices are made in China and India — two of the prime targets in President Donald Trump’s trade war.

But Apple appeared to gain a reprieve from Trump’s most onerous threats earlier this month by adding another $100 billion on top of an earlier $500 billion investment pledge to the U.S. The tariff relief may enable Apple to minimize or even avoid price increases for the iPhone, just as Google has done with the Pixel 10 models.

Google on Tuesday unleashed another wave of artificial intelligence technology to accelerate a year-long makeover of its search engine that is changing the way people get information and curtailing the flow of internet traffic to websites.

The next phase outlined at Google’s annual developers conference includes releasing a new “AI mode” option in the United States. The feature makes interacting with Google’s search engine more like having a conversation with an expert capable of answering questions on just about any topic imaginable.

AI mode is being offered to all comers in the U.S. just two-and-half-months after the company began testing with a limited Labs division audience.

Google is also feeding its latest AI model Gemini 2.5, into its search algorithms and will soon begin testing other AI features, such as the ability to automatically buy tickets to concerts and conduct searches through live video feeds.

The expansion builds upon a transformation that began a year ago with the introduction of conversational summaries called “AI overviews” that have been increasingly appearing at the top of its results page and eclipsing its traditional rankings of web links.

About 1.5 billion people now regularly engage with “AI overviews,” according to Google, and most users are now entering longer and more complex queries.

“What all this progress means is that we are in a new phase of the AI platform shift, where decades of research are now becoming reality for people all over the world,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said before a packed crowd in an amphitheater near the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Although Pichai and other Google executives predicted AI overviews would trigger more searches and ultimately more clicks to other sites, it hasn’t worked out that way so far, according to the findings of search optimization firm BrightEdge.

Clickthrough rates from Google’s search results have declined by nearly 30% during the past year, according to BrightEdge’s recently released study, which attributed the decrease to people becoming increasingly satisfied with AI overviews.

The decision to make AI mode broadly available after a relatively short test period reflects Google’s confidence that the technology won’t habitually spew misinformation that tarnishes its brand’s reputation, and acknowledges the growing competition from other AI-powered search options from the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The rapid rise of AI alternatives emerged as a recurring theme in legal proceedings that could force Google to dismantle parts of its internet empire after a federal judge last year declared its search engine to be an illegal monopoly.

In testimony during a trial earlier this month, longtime Apple executive Eddy Cue said Google searches done through the iPhone maker’s Safari browser have been declining because more people are leaning on AI-powered alternatives.

And Google has cited the upheaval being caused by AI’s rise as one of the main reasons that it should only be required to make relatively minor changes to the way it operates its search engine because technology already is changing the competitive landscape.

But Google’s reliance on more AI so far appears to be enabling its search engine to maintain its mantle as the internet’s main gateway — a position that’s main reason its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., boasts a market value of $2 trillion.

During the year ending in March, Google received 136 billion monthly visits, nearly 29 times more than ChatGPT, according to data compiled by onelittleweb.com.

Even Google’s own AI mode acknowledged that the company’s search engine seems unlikely to be significantly hurt by the shift to AI technology when a reporter from The Associated Press asked whether its introduction would make the company even more powerful.

“Yes, it is highly highly that Google’s AI mode will make Google more powerful, particularly in the realm of information access and online influence,” the AI mode responded. The feature also warns web publishers should be concerned about AI mode reducing the traffic that they get from search results.

Google’s upcoming tests in its Labs division foreshadow the next wave of AI technology likely to be made available to the masses.

Besides using its Project Mariner technology to test the ability of an AI agent to buy tickets and book restaurant reservations, Google will also experiment with searches done through live video and an opt-in option to give its AI technology access to people’s Gmail so it can learn more about a user’s tastes and interests. Other features on this summer’s test list include a “Deep Search” option that will use AI to dig even deeper into complex topics and another tool that will produce graphical presentations of sports and finance data.

Google is also introducing its equivalent of VIP access to all its AI technology with an “Ultra” subscription package that will cost $250 per month and include 30 terabytes of storage, too. That’s a big step beyond Google’s previous top-of-the-line AI “pro” package that cost $20 per month and included two terabytes of storage. ——

The Associated Press and Google have a licensing and technology agreement that gives Google’s Gemini AI chatbot access to AP’s news coverage.

Google’s profits soared 28% in this year’s opening quarter, overcoming the competitive and legal threats that its internet empire is facing amid an economy roiled by a global trade war.

The numbers released Thursday by Google parent Alphabet Inc. indicated the company is rising to the challenge so far, but investors are likely to remain concerned about the turbulent times ahead.

The Mountain View, California, company earned $26.5 billion, or $2.15 per share, during the January-March period, up from $20.7 billion, or $1.64 per share, at the same time last year. Revenue rose 12% from last year to $96.5 billion. The results easily exceeded analysts’ projections, according to FactSet Research.

“We continued to see healthy growth and momentum across the business,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts Thursday during a conference call.

Alphabet’s stock gained 4% in extended trading after the numbers came out. The shares had fallen by 16% since the end of last year.

Google’s first-quarter performance illustrated the continuing power of its long-dominant search engine in a sea of uncertainty. While grappling with competitive threats emerging as artificial intelligence reshapes technology, Google is also battling court decisions condemning its search engine and digital ad network as illegal monopolies.

The AI-driven upheaval has opened new opportunities for people to find helpful advice, insights and information through more conversational search options from the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity.

Google’s long-dominant search engine is countering the new competition with a feature called AI Overviews that appear above web links in its results. It is also testing a conversational tool called AI Mode that would usher in an even more radical change to its business model.

“The company delivered a sound response to those questioning the solidity of the search business amid ever-increasing AI demand,” Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro said.

But Google is trying to keep its business intact as by the U.S. Justice Department attempts to break up the company and impose other restraints after a federal judge last year branded its search engine an illegal monopoly. To make matters worse, its digital ad network also was found to be illegally abusing its power earlier this month in another case brought by the Justice Department.

President Donald Trump’s trade war has injected more uncertainty into the mix by rattling the financial markets amid fears the tariffs will reignite inflation while dragging the economy into a recession. Although Google’s digital services aren’t directly impacted by the tariffs, a recession would likely curtail the spending on ads that generate most of Alphabet’s revenue.

But there were few signs of a slowdown in the past quarter. Google’s ad revenue during the period totaled $72.5 billion, an 11% increase from the same time a year ago.

The steady growth emboldened Alphabet to stand firm on plans to invest $75 billion on AI and other technologies this year while also pursuing approval of a $32 billion deal to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz.

Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion.

The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google’s namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation.

After the U.S. Justice Department targeted Google’s ubiquitous search engine during President Donald Trump’s first administration, the same agency went after the company’s lucrative digital advertising network in 2023 during President Joe Biden’s ensuing administration in an attempt to undercut the power that Google has amassed since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.

Although antitrust regulators prevailed both times, the battle is likely to continue for several more years as Google tries to overturn the two monopoly decisions in appeals while forging ahead in the new and highly lucrative technological frontier of artificial intelligence.

The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

Brinkema’s 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps.

The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google’s $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.

The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller.

After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department’s assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.

“For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.” Brinkema wrote. “Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features.”

Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn’t break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld.

The Justice Department “failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive,” Brinkema wrote. “Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices.”

That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately comment on the judge’s decision.

In a statement, Google said it will appeal the ruling.

“We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

Analysts such as Brian Pitz of BMO Markets had been predicting that Google would likely lose the case, helping to brace investors for the latest setback to the company and its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., whose shares declined 1% in afternoon trading. Alphabet’s stock has plunged by 20% so far this year.

As it did in the search monopoly case, Google and its corporate parent Alphabet vehemently denied the Justice Department’s allegations. Their lawyers argued the government largely based its case on an antiquated concept of a market that existed a decade ago while underestimating a highly competitive market for advertising spending that includes the likes of Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Amazon, Microsoft and Comcast.

The market as drawn in the Justice Department’s case didn’t include ads that appear on mobile apps, streaming television services, or other platforms to which internet users have increasingly migrated, prompting Google lawyer Karen Dunn to compare the government’s definition a “time capsule with a BlackBerry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card” during her opening statement when the trial began last September.

At trial, the Justice Department’s lawyers emphasized the harm to news publishers that has arisen from Google’s alleged dominance of the marketplace. Witnesses from Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and other newspapers, and News Corp., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, testified about the difficulties they have faced and what they said was a lack of alternatives to Google’s ad tech. Those companies rely on online advertising to fund their news operations and make their articles free to consumers on the internet, government lawyers have argued.

Now, government is in position to try to dismantle that byzantine ad system. When the case was filed more than two years ago during the Biden administration, the Justice Department asserted Google should be forced to sell, at a minimum, its Ad Manager product, which includes the technology used by website publishers and the ad exchange.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s digital ad sales continued to grow at a healthy clip during the holiday season, but that wasn’t enough to offset investors’ worries about whether its big bet on artificial intelligence will be lucrative as once envisioned.

The October-December results released Tuesday by Google parent Alphabet Inc. showed the company is continuing to reap even more profits from its dominant search engine and other peripheral services.

Alphabet earned $26.5 billion, or $2.15 per share, during last year’s final quarter, a 28% increase from the same time during the previous year. Revenue rose 12% from the previous year to $96.5 billion. The earnings eclipsed analyst forecasts of $2.13 per share, but the revenue fell slightly below projections, according to FactSet Research.

More importantly, revenue growth in the Google Cloud division tethered to the AI craze wasn’t as robust as had been anticipated.

That letdown contributed to a more than 8% drop in Alphabet’s stock price after the numbers came out. The downturn reversed a recent rally that had elevated Alphabet’s shares to a new all-time high earlier Tuesday during the regular trading session.

“The reaction underscores concerns that rivals like Microsoft, with its OpenAI partnership, are better positioned to convert AI hype into revenue,” said Investing.com analyst Jesse Cohen.

But the AI-generated overviews that Google has been increasingly displaying in at the top of its search results appeared to be helping to bring in more advertising. Google’s ad sales climbed 11% from the previous year to $72.5 billion to exceed analyst estimates.

“The early signs suggest that AI is working for Google,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, which helps websites rank higher in search results. “What it does for Google is keep more of the digital experience happening within its search engine. And by the time they send someone to another site, shoppers and readers have already gotten further down their journey. So that visitor is worth a lot more to an advertiser.”

But Google also has spending billions of dollars on its AI expansion, a huge investment that some investors are questioning after t he Chinese startup DeepSeek found an effective way to deploy similar technology at a fraction of the cost. Alphabet is expecting its ongoing AI expansion to increase its capital from about $60 billion last year to $75 billion this year.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai sought to reassure investors all that spending will pay off during a Tuesday conference call by emphasizing the way AI is helping to boost Google’s fortunes by attracting more search traffic and making other services more popular.

“The company is in a great rhythm and cadence, building, testing and launching products faster than ever before,” Pichai said.

Before the fourth-quarter results came out, Google made a change that in its AI principles signaling it may be more open to selling the technology in areas that it had previously indicated it would avoid. The revised principles removed previous commitments not to deploy AI in weaponry or surveillance that had been in place since 2018. Pichai didn’t address the change during Tuesday’s conference call and Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The uncertainty over AI isn’t the only worry hanging over Google.

The Mountain View, California, company also is facing a regulatory crackdown in the U.S., by far its most lucrative market, raising the specter that its revenue could be undercut.

After weighing the evidence presented during a high-profile trial, a federal judge last year declared Google’s search engine is an illegal monopoly — a decision that has opened the door for regulators to propose forcing the company to sell its Chrome web browser.

Court hearings on how Google should be punished for its abuses in the search market are scheduled to begin in April, with a decision anticipated before autumn.

Besides the legal assault on its search engine, Google also has been ordered to tear down the barriers protecting its Play Store for Android smartphone apps. That ruling is currently on hold while Google appeals. Google is also awaiting a ruling in antitrust trial in Virginia revolving around the technology underlying its digital ad network.

The Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a motion calling for Google to sell its Chrome search engine, arguing in court documents that “the playing field is not level.” The Justice Department is also recommending dissolving any contracts in which Google is the default search engine on devices such as iPhones. Kelly O’Grady explains.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is injecting its search engine with more artificial intelligence that will enable people to voice questions about images and occasionally organize an entire page of results, despite the technology’s past misadventures with misleading information.

The latest changes announced Thursday herald the next step in an AI-driven makeover that Google launched in mid-May when it began responding to some queries with summaries written by the technology at the top of its influential results page. Those summaries, dubbed “AI Overviews,” raised fears among publishers that fewer people would click on search links to their websites and undercut the traffic needed to sell digital ads that help finance their operations.

Google is addressing some of those ongoing worries by inserting even more links to other websites within the AI Overviews, which already have been reducing the visits to general news publishers such as The New York Times and technology review specialists such as TomsGuide.com, according to an analysis released last month by search traffic specialist BrightEdge.

The same study found the citations within AI Overviews are driving more traffic to highly specialized sites such as Bloomberg.com and the National Institute of Health.

Google’s decision to pump even more AI into the search engine that remains the crown jewel of its $2 trillion empire leaves little doubt that the Mountain View, California, company is tethering its future to a technology propelling the biggest industry shift since Apple unveiled the first iPhone 17 years ago.

The next phase of Google’s AI evolution builds upon its 7-year-old Lens feature that processes queries about objects in a picture. The Lens option is now generates more than 20 billion queries per month, and is particularly popular among users from 18 to 24 years old. That’s a younger demographic that Google is trying to cultivate as it faces competition from AI alternatives powered by ChatGPT and Perplexity that are positioning themselves as answer engines.

Now, people will be able to use Lens to ask a question in English about something they are viewing through a camera lens — as if they were talking about it with a friend — and get search results. Users signed up for tests of the new voice-activated search features in Google Labs will also be able to take video of moving objects, such as fish swimming around aquarium, while posing a conversational question and be presented an answer through an AI Overview.

“The whole goal is can we make search simpler to use for people, more effortless to use and make it more available so people can search any way, anywhere they are,” said Rajan Patel, Google’s vice president of search engineering and a co-founder of the Lens feature.

Although advances in AI offer the potential of making search more convenient, the technology also sometimes spits out bad information — a risk that threatens to damage the credibility of Google’s search engine if the inaccuracies become too frequent. Google has already had some embarrassing episodes with its AI Overviews, including advising people to put glue on pizza and to eat rocks. The company blamed those missteps on data voids and online troublemakers deliberately trying to steer its AI technology in a wrong direction.

Google is now so confident that it has fixed some of its AI’s blind spots that it will rely on the technology to decide what types of information to feature on the results page. Despite its previous bad culinary advice about pizza and rocks, AI will initially be used for the presentation of the results for queries in English about recipes and meal ideas entered on mobile devices. The AI-organized results are supposed to be broken down into different groups of clusters consisting of photos, videos and articles about the subject.