What is the Most Searched Thing on Google?

In 2022 ‘Youtube’ was Google’s most searched term for the second year running. And – as you probably know – Google owns YouTube, so that’s a big win for the search engine giant.

We’ve collated the list of the terms most searched on Google for the US, UK and worldwide, alongside the website that won the most traffic for that search term, and we’ve even thrown in some analysis, as we’re nice like that. So who and what feature in the top 100 and what does that mean for 2023? Let’s dive in…

100 top keywords on Google – worldwide

Key stats about the most searched global keywords

• Youtube beats Facebook to the top spot with the most searches on Google with 4.65bn total searches in 2022 vs 3.87bn respectively. Youtube’s average monthly search volume is 387.75m and Facebook’s is 322.60m.
• ‘Ukraine’ was the most Googled country, with over 310.81m searches (averaging 25.9m searches per month)
• 11% of the most Google searches are for ‘adult entertainment’ sites, with Pornhub taking third spot in the list
• Wordle was 2022’s most impressive newcomer with an average of 45.63m monthly searches (547.6m total searches)
• The UK’s Premier League trumped the US’s NFL in the list, but the most Googled sports term in 2022 was NBA with 1.24bn searches
• Of the top 10 Google searches, four lead to Google-owned sites: Youtube, Google Translate (x2 searches) and Gmail. And two lead to Facebook (Meta): Facebook and Instagram (with Whatsapp Web at number 11)
• Amber Heard made it into the top 100 of the most popular Google searches at position 85 with 251.4m searches, whereas Johnny Depp was just outside at position 103 with 222.73m.

100 top searches on Google in the USA

Key stats about the US’ most searched keywords on Google

• ‘Weather’ is the most searched thing on Google in the US with 95.65m average monthly searches
• ‘Youtube’ is the most searched word on Google worldwide, but it is third in the US, behind ‘weather’ and ‘Facebook’ respectively
• 10% of the top 100 searches are for ‘adult entertainment’ (worldwide is 11%)
• Ukraine was the US’ most searched for country with a total of 111.85m searches. On the flipside, Russia had 65.33m
• ‘Trump’ was the most searched for person with 7.78m monthly searches, followed by ‘Amber Heard’ with 7.48m
• Elon Musk was the third most searched for person with 5.63m monthly searches, and ‘Tesla stock’ received more searches than ‘Tesla’ with a staggering 4.29m average monthly searches

100 top searches on Google in the UK

Key stats about the UK’s most searched keywords on Google

• The Brits are famed for their obsession with weather, and the 2022 search landscape backs this up: ‘Weather’ was the most searched word on Google with a total of over 367m searches
• BBC still dominates in the UK, with 14 of the top search terms leading to it capturing the most traffic. Searches like ‘weather’ and ‘world cup’ ended up with the BBC taking the lion’s share of traffic
• The rise in inflation and mortgage rates didn’t damped Brits’ interest in property: ‘rightmove’ was the 16th most searched term amassing over 63m searches (5.26 monthly)
• ‘Universal credit’ was the 20th most searched term with 56m total searches (4.68m monthly) – a sign of the cost of living crisis reflected in online behavior

What do the most Googled things tell marketers?

Search behavior and results

• While Youtube is the most searched query in the world, the website getting most traffic from top searches is Google itself (12.1% traffic share)
• For the top 100 global search terms, the search intent is as follows: 70% navigational, 10% informational and 20% mixed intent
• In the top 1,000 list, the most searched words on Google are in English. Only 51 are not English language
• .com URLs rule the roost – .org and .net domains only have 3% of entries each in the top 100 of the global search landscape

Paid traffic in the top Google searches 2022

• ‘Amazon’ is the top paid keyword globally (and in the US and UK)
• The least expensive search term in the top 100 is ‘Amber Heard’ with a CPC of $0.01
• The most expensive search term in the top 100 is ‘NBA’ with a CPC of $2.62
• The most expensive search term in the top 1,000 is ‘macys’ with a CPC of $11.44
• Interestingly, the term ‘yt’ receives more organic traffic for youtube.com than the term ‘youtube’, which gets far more clicks from Paid

Methodology

• We updated this page in January 2023. Data for 2022 is for the full year, giving you an accurate view on the search landscape and top searches: January 2022 – December 2022
• The lists are for worldwide, US and Uk specifically
• We have included: average monthly search volume for the year, traffic (how many of the searches end up going to a website), organic and paid traffic (split by whether or not a searcher clicked on a paid ad) and behind the scenes we looked at CPC (the average cost per click to capture the traffic searching this term)

How to find the most Googled search terms

Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence allows you to view things people are searching for by country and by industry. Our data covers 40 billion keywords worldwide (we’re constantly growing our keyword list), and we analyze over 2 terabytes of data each day.

To create these top 100 lists, we used our Keyword by Industry feature in our Keyword Research Tool, here’s a quick breakdown of how to do it:

1. Within ‘Keyword by Industry’, choose ‘all’, or – to get a more targeted list – choose a specific industry
2. Choose either ‘worldwide’ data or a specific country
3. Sort by traffic to see the most searched keywords – voila!

If you want to use the list for your SEO or content strategy, we suggest inserting some of the key search terms into our keyword generator tool. It automatically generates a list of keywords based on a seed keyword across any language or market. It can help you find anything from exact search terms to niche, long-tail keywords and the search volume for all.

Use the keyword generator to:

• Cluster your keywords by topic, analyze search intent, and business value
• Build your content marketing strategy with SE-optimized content
• Find gaps and keyword opportunities in your content marketing plan
• Discover the best keywords for your paid search campaigns
• Optimize your PPC campaigns

FAQs

What was the most searched term on Google in the last 12 months?

The top search in Google is ‘Youtube’. In 2022 it received 4.65bn searches. Facebook was the second most searched term with 3.87bn searches.

What is the most searched term on Google in the USA?

‘Weather’ is the US’ most searched Google term, with 95.65m searches each month. The second most searched term is ‘facebook’ (76.93 searches per month) followed by ‘youtube’ (71.03 searches per month)

What is the most searched term on Google in the UK for the past 12 months?

‘Weather’ is the UK’s most searched Google term, with 30.60m searches each month. The second most searched term is ‘facebook’ (16.78 searches per month) followed by ‘youtube’ (16.43 searches per month)