India’s Search Behaviour Underwent a Major Shift in 2025

India’s top Google searches in 2025 reflect a country navigating multiple worlds at once. The year’s most-searched terms range from the Indian Premier League and Maha Kumbh Mela to cutting-edge generative-AI tools and real-time alerts about air quality or earthquakes.

India’s top Google searches in 2025 reflect a country navigating multiple worlds at once. The year’s most-searched terms range from the Indian Premier League and Maha Kumbh Mela to cutting-edge generative-AI tools and real-time alerts about air quality or earthquakes.

At the top of this list sits the Indian Premier League, once again the most-searched term in the country. In a fragmented media environment, the IPL remains one of the few shared national reference points that still cuts across language, region and class. What is more revealing is the search query that follows immediately after it: Google Gemini, a generative-AI platform that climbed into the top tier of Indian searches in 2025. The adjacency of cricket and artificial intelligence on the same leaderboard signals a structural shift. This shift is a fallout of the transformation of search itself over the past year. 

In 2025, Google rolled out AI-driven search features in India, including an “AI Mode” that allows users to ask multi-step questions, upload images, switch between voice and text, and receive synthesised, conversational responses rather than a simple list of links. Search has moved from being primarily an index of the web to becoming an interpretive layer over it. Users are no longer just looking things up; they are increasingly asking the system to explain, compare, summarise and even imagine. This change in interface has also altered behaviour. Queries are longer, more descriptive, more exploratory. Search now resembles a dialogue rather than a transaction.

The rise of AI-focused queries flows directly from this redesign of the search experience. Among the most popular AI-related searches in India this year were prompts for “Ghibli-style AI” images, tools for generating 3D objects, and explainers such as “Grok explain”. These reflect a population testing the limits of machine creativity, using search not just to retrieve knowledge but as a low-friction creative interface for visualisation, ideation and design. 

Importantly, these new AI-driven searches did not replace existing demands, they layered on top of them. Alongside Gemini and AI imagery, old segments like sport, religion, culture and entertainment remained firmly embedded. Searches for tournaments such as the Asia Cup 2025 or the ICC Champions Trophy continued. Pilgrimage and travel queries for Kumbh-related routes or holiday destinations persisted. Popular films, rising stars, regional festivals, and lifestyle-oriented queries also featured prominently. 

Queries related to air quality, extreme weather and seismic activity rose alongside leisure and lifestyle searches. Search is being used with equal intensity for aspiration and for vigilance, at once an instrument of exploration and a tool of risk management. A single user may move between these functions within minutes. The boundary between information, recreation and precaution has thinned almost to the point of disappearance.

For much of the past decade, digital platforms functioned primarily as distribution systems—for news, video, music and social content. In 2025, they are increasingly instruments of production. The popularity of stylised AI art tools and prompt-based generators shows that a growing number of users are not merely browsing but actively creating with machine assistance. This marks a move from consumption to assisted authorship.

In this sense, Google Search now operates as a real-time cultural archive, registering not only what people want to know but what they worry about, what they celebrate, what they plan for and how they imagine. As users rely more on machine-generated summaries than on curated sources, search engines begin to act not only as gateways but as interpreters. The implications for knowledge, trust and verification are still unfolding, but 2025 marks a clear inflection point in how information is mediated at scale in India.

The 2025 search record resists any simple narrative of technological convergence. Digital modernity in India is not replacing older forms of life so much as compressing them into a single interface. If there is one way to describe 2025 in India, it is this: search became less a passive ledger of curiosities and more an active workshop of possibility. The queries we typed, snapped, asked aloud, or hovered over, they did more than reflect our world. They helped reshape it.