Best of 2025: Top Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics that trended on Google Search

Search engine giant Google has released the annual Year in Search report, revealing fascinating insights into what things have intrigued people the most throughout the year.

2025 was an eventful year with a lot of joyful moments, along with sorrow. While our men and women in blue won several global cricket tournaments, such as the International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Trophy and the Asia Cup, India lost legendary actor Dharmendra and singing sensation Zubeen Garg. The Sub-continent also suffered a terrorist attack, but was able to give a resounding response to Pakistan by blowing up major terrorist camps at the heart of the nation.

This year also saw the release of blockbuster movies Kantara: A Legend (Chapter 1), Saiyaara, War 2, Coolie.

Besides sports and entertainment, generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI)-related topics such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Deepseek and others trended on Google Search. Here are the details.

Google Gemini

Google Gemini 3.

Google's Gemini has become one of the most popular gen AI applications on all platforms. The company recently released a new Gemini 3.0 model that has outranked OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Gemini AI Photo

Google Nano Banana AI tool feature.

Google, earlier this year in August, introduced the advanced generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) Gemini 2.5 Flash Nano Large Language Model (LLM), code-named Nano Banana, in the Gemini AI app.

It was an instant hit among all users worldwide, including in India. People played with the feature-rich Nano Banana-powered photo editing feature Reimagine. It can turn any mundane-looking photo into a fun, engaging piece of art.

Grok

FILE PHOTO: xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration.

xAI's generative AI model Grok has been the most popular AI application compared to ChatGPT in 2025.

Deepseek AI

The Deepseek logo and words reading "Artificial Intelligence AI" are seen in this illustration.

Chinese generative AI model Deepseek AI, earlier this year, took the internet by storm due to its super-fast responses using minimal queries compared to ChatGPT.

Perplexity AI

FILE PHOTO: Perplexity AI application icon is seen in this illustration.

Airtel, earlier this year, partnered with Perplexity AI to offer the latter's services free of cost to subscribers in India.

Google AI Studio

FILE PHOTO: Google logo and AI Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration.

While Gemini AI has become a popular app on smartphones, the Google AI Studio is used by several million professionals, students, and researchers to experiment with and build applications using Google's most advanced AI models.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT logo

Since the launch of new competitors such as Grok, Gemini, Deepseek, OpenAI's ChatGPT's popularity has declined.

ChatGPT Ghibli

'Ghibli-fied' images of famous personalities.

In early 2025, OpenAI launched a new Ghibli art style image creator tool on ChatGPT. It has instant hit among users.

But, after the launch of Gemini Nano Banana in September, the popularity of ChatGPT has come down.

For the uninitiated, Studio Ghibli's art style was developed by a Japanese animation studio, co-founded by director Hayao Miyazaki. The art features a very distinctive, hand-drawn, painted image.

Google Flow

Google Flow AI Cinema creator app.

Google Flow is the most advanced model, which combines the power of Veo, Imagen and Gemini.

The new AI filmmaking tool can assist users in effortlessly creating cinematic stories and scenes.

Users can describe the scene in natural language and manage the elements such as the cast, locations, objects and styles of the story in a single convenient place.

Based on the script, Flow can weave the narrative into beautiful scenes.

Ghibli Style Image Generator

Studio Ghibli logo

After OpenAI released a new Ghibli-style image generator feature to ChatGPT, people also looked for alternative applications to produce similar content.