Interest in veganism since 2010 - Google Trends Analysis
9 March 2026
Summary
Gathering data on the growth or decline in the number of vegans is hard and held back by limited availability of samples in time and location. This report uses the rich and fine-grained data publicly available on Google Trends to estimate the change in number of vegans over the last 16 years, controlling for keyword popularity. We estimate that the number of vegans has increased by 3.8x during this period. This is down from a peak at the end of 2019 of 3.9x. There is a difference between dietary and non-dietary estimates, where estimates based on dietary search terms peak sooner, and end lower (peak=4.8x 2019, end=2.8x) than non-dietary ones (peak=5x) that end higher than ever before. This highlights there are separate trends for terms tracking ethical vegans and those tracking people focused on a vegan diet only. A lot of the increase is seen in the last year. This appears to be supported mostly from increased interest in non-English speaking countries, where English speaking countries have a more stable trend or smaller increase.
Figure 1. The averaged results of all vegan search terms controlled for by their general search term. Results are combined for all, dietary and non-dietary terms.
Introduction
Vegans represent a minority in the world, with their proportion measured as less than a percent to a few percentage points in different countries. Notable exceptions are India and Mexico, which are estimated to have 9% vegans in their populations [1].
Reliable global numbers are hard to find. In a blog post no longer directly available, 1% or 79 million, is estimated based on per country statistics in 2019 [2]. No estimates were found for any African country, representing a large gap that is hard to estimate from neighbouring countries or similar cultures.
Google Trends has been used before to gauge the popularity growth of veganism. A peak of search terms "veganism", "vegan diet" and "vegan recipes" is found at the end of 2019 with a decrease after that, reported on by Sky News [3]. A report by Chef’s Pencil finds a peak around 2020 and stagnation or slow decline since then [4].
Finder runs annual research on the proportion of vegans in the UK; they found a 40% increase of the number of vegans in 2020 [5]. And in terms of the total population 2.6% in 2023, 4.7% in 2024, and 2.1% in 2025 [6][7]. These are large swings, and Finder makes no estimates of trends beyond 1-year periods, making it hard to extract a longer trend.
Veganism can also refer to different things. Abstaining from animal products for food is at the core of the term, however beyond that the reasons people have for going vegan and the extent to which non-food animal products and exploitation is avoided differs. Veganism brings benefits for the environment, potentially for personal health, taste and texture for some, and the animals otherwise exploited for their products. This last reason is the core of ethical veganism and where the term originally comes from, as supported by The Vegan Society, which provides the definition:
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."-- The Vegan Society [8]
Ethical vegans can be expected to behave different to people who abstain from animals for personal health reasons. E.g. wearing leather clothing has no discernible effect on a person’s health, while obtaining it from a farm exploits one or more animals for their skin. From an environmental vegan’s perspective, leather may be problematic for its polluting tanning process rather than its impact on the animals. These different groups are hypothesised to gain and lose popularity in different ways.
E.g. sticking to any diet for health reasons is hard. Specifically for weight loss, 95% of diets fail in the long run, resulting in either no effect or even higher weight, and an end to following the diet [9]. In 2014, Faunalytics found that 84% of the group of people eating vegetarian and vegan quit their diet [10]. Assuming vegetarian and vegan diets fare no better on adherence for weight loss compared to other diets, those not in it for the weight loss must do better and lower the average. This in turn could affect the change the trend growth and decline.
This report aims to estimate the trend of veganism’s popularity over the last 16 years and hypothesise this will be different for diet-only and ethical vegans. We analyse the searches people have made on Google.
Searches uniquely done by vegans are used as a proxy for the relative number of vegans. Variability in search term usage is controlled for by comparing the vegan-specific search terms to those used by the whole population. This is essential as many terms vary seasonally, and the time period includes possibly dramatic changes of search terms during the pandemic lockdowns, and any number of other variations.
In addition, a split is made between dietary and non-dietary search terms, to distinguish vegans for health or diet from ethical vegans. This approach is applied to the worldwide dataset, for English speakers at least.
Method
Approach 1
Many common searches like "jacket" or "restaurant" can be modified by adding the word "vegan" in front of it, i.e. "vegan jacket" and "vegan restaurant". This gives a pair of search terms that are fed into Google Trends (GT), for 1 Jan 2010 to 28 Feb 2026 (e.g. "vegan jacket"). Certain terms may become more or less popular over time. Using a pair allows us to control for any such changes over time, under the assumption that the version with "vegan" in front of it has a similar popularity change, and that this term represents searches made predominantly by vegans.
A list of search terms was created, using terms that make sense to be veganised (see Supplementary Materials). These should ideally be unambiguous and must have enough search traffic - GT data available is sampled, limiting the breadth of terms usable. The search terms are split into two categories, those related to diet (dietary), and those not related to diet (non-dietary). We assume that ethical vegans will contribute to both dietary and non-dietary term usage, while those motivated by health and diet contribute to the dietary terms only.
The search term pairs were put into GT individually via API, and the results downloaded. Because of sampling by GT, search terms that have too few searches at a given time, register as 0. Any term pair with more than 3 of those 0 values is considered too limited to use and was discarded.
Trend data received from GT is normalized to have the highest value at 100. These are transformed to have 100 match the first-year average instead. Next, the values of each term with "vegan" are divided by the values of their corresponding control term of that time. Finally, the average of all term pairs in the dietary and non-dietary groups are calculated.
This approach was duplicated and applied to specific countries. Only the US appears to have the data granularity needed to make the full analysis.
Approach 2
To find out where the peak in the last year could originate from, a more localised yet simpler GT analysis was done per country. Here we retrieve GT data for a single search term: "vegan". The data then compares this in the last three data points with the same three month average a year prior.
Countries with no results for this term were removed from the data set before download. Countries that did not have any values for either of the measured months were removed as well, avoiding division by zero.
The Python scripts for both approaches is available in the Supplementary Materials. This utilises a free account of SerpAPI to connect to Google Trends and retrieve the data. It is also used to create the graphs for approach 1 and a CSV file for approach 2 to feed into Datawrapper manually.
Results
The trend in all term pairs follow a similar pattern: they start (2010) with fewer vegan searches at 1x (by design), then rise to a peak, and fall again more slowly or sometimes stabilise from there. Finally, a rise is seen in the last half year. See figure 1 at the top of the page. Previous reports have shown that the patterns are broadly the same for each individual search term, while having different timings and amplitudes [11].
The dietary and non-dietary signals are very similar from the start of the measured period to the beginning of 2017. After this, dietary based terms suggest a much larger increase of the number of dietary vegans than the non-dietary ones do, and subsequently the dietary vegan terms drop a bit lower, indicating a clear peak. The vegan dietary terms peak at 4.8x in January 2020 (the same times as the combined measures). The last year this decreases to 2.1x before rising a bit again. The vegan non-dietary terms peak at 5x since 2010 on February 2026, the most recent data point.
Figure 2. The averaged results of all vegan search terms controlled for by their general search term in the United States. Results are combined for all, dietary and non-dietary terms.
The largest population English speaking country is the US. The trends for the US, see figure 2, are similar in some and different in other aspects compared to the global figures. The rise seen globally over 16 years is present but with less magnitude. Dietary terms in the US grow faster in the first 6 years measured than non-dietary terms, which stay more or less stable in that time. Finally, the growth since August 2025 is less pronounced. This all suggests that the recent global increase is stronger outside the US. Google Trends data is sampled and fewer terms have enough data to be included in this analysis.
The second largest English speaking country is the UK. Only a handful of veganised term had enough data to be analysed in the same way. Because of the lack of search terms, the UK specific analysis was discarded. A future investigation would likely find enough data points when starting the time period later, between 2015 and 2020.
Globally, 103 countries had a data points for every measured month. 80 countries have seen growth over 5% in the last year for the search term "vegan", while 7 saw a decrease greater than 5%. 16 countries saw change under 5% in either direction. The average change was +44.4% for all countries.
The trend shows a growth in interest for the term "vegan" in many areas of the world, especially in Asia and the Middle East. These regions show a strong increase. All countries bar Russia and Iran show growth, and the growth is typically large. Bangladesh (+283.8%) shows the highest of any country globally. The most populous countries in Asia show a high growth as well: India (+96.7%), China(+145.2%), Indonesia (+74%), and Pakistan (+70.8%).
A more stable pattern is observed in English speaking countries and most of Western Europe. With changes under 5% for the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, and relatively marginal change in Australia +8%, Ireland -6.1% and New Zealand -8.2%. Given the high variance in the source data, these don't indicate true growth or decline.
Discussion
This report shows a clear signal for a peak in veganism’s popularity amongst global English speakers, with a marked increase of over threefold over the 16 years to Feb 2026. This peak is consistent with reported growth before 2021 [5] and decreases from a peak reported by other estimates [3][4]. The change in the last year, measured with two separate approaches, shows a recovery of interest in veganism recently that is not (yet?) widely reported. This method can be repeated for specific countries or language. However, the data sampling limits use to countries with lots of data, and should be translated for best result. It can also extend over a longer period as time passes. The distinction between dietary and non-dietary terms indicates an important difference between people being vegan for dietary and ethical reasons.
One way to interpret this data is that there was a temporary diet-focused vegan trend from mid 2017 to early 2020. This was not followed by ethical vegan searches at that time. Suggesting that the growth was powered by dietary-only vegans who do not increase non-dietary searches. During that time, the ethical vegan groups still grew, though by a smaller amount than the dietary ones. In the second half of 2025 the reverse happened, dietary veganism terms become more popular, and with it it brings a smaller increase of dietary veganism terms. This can be explained by the rise of ethical vegans, who use both dietary and non-dietary vegan searches.
Inevitably, this separation of the groups will not be as clear cut as assumed above. Some ethical vegans may appreciate health benefits of their diet, and some starting because of their diet may pick up other vegan habits such as not wearing animal-based leather to fit in the vegan group. A limitation of this report is that these differences could not be directly measured. E.g. the large drop in diet-based vegans could also have had some downward pressure on the non-dietary terms without the number of ethical vegans decreasing, likewise an increase in ethical veganism alone would raise dietary searches, which may explain the dietary increase in the last half year of the data collected. However, even if this were a large effect, significant growth of the ethical vegan population over the measured period, especially in the last year, is likely.
Additional limitations from this approach are that any findings are only relative. In other words, this approach can find interest in vegan terms increasing or decreasing over time, but this does not translated to the number of vegans in the population. For that, this approach must be grounded by other methods out of the scope of this report. It also of course relies on Google users. In some countries like the US this might be a good enough proxy, in others this might introduce a bias. When looking at the global results, we assume that the majority of results come from countries where a broad section of the population uses Google. That would mean that such biases would be relatively small compared to the total number of searches. Finally, the current set of terms applies only to English speakers. While the approach can easily be adopted for some other languages, others may lack the simple structure of putting the exact same term ("vegan" in English) in front or after another (e.g. "jacket" in English).
Zooming in on the last year's increase, the second approach shows most of the growth in veganism is not happening equally across the globe. In English speaking countries or Western Europe the pattern is stable no clear growth nor decline. Asia, the Middle East, Central America, Eastern Europe, and most of Africa where sufficient data is available, all see increases for the term "vegan", sometimes over 100%.
This may explain a trend of reporting a decline or stalling of veganism, while being consistent with global growth of interest. Articles such as "Where have all the vegans gone?" by Dazed[12] focus both on the dietary aspect of veganism and on the US and UK. This, as well as the authors' own bias towards English sources, may make veganism appear to be stalling everywhere, when this may only be true in these specific areas and only for dietary veganism.
The second approach has nonetheless its own limitations. The term "vegan" does not exist in most languages, may not be the most popular synonym used, and can have subtly different meanings. We manually compared the use of "vegan" to the translation for French (végétalien), German (veganer) and Dutch (veganistisch). In all three cases "vegan" was used more often than the translated version. Nonetheless, this pattern may not hold in countries with fewer English speakers or culturally more different. Therefore, this approach could still be biased toward English speakers in non-English-speaking countries, and those could behave differently from the non-English speaking population.
The difficulty to interpret a change in Google's "vegan" searches for every country and language is offset by the strength of the signal. The first approach's findings for a global increase paired by a moderate increase in the US, suggests a rise in interest outside the US. Because of the uncertainty of interpretation large changes are required to draw any conclusions. We see such large changes in a number of counties, especially in Asia.
Combined, the two approaches support the notion that interest in veganism has increased globally over 16 years. In the last year, especially interest in ethical (or at least non-dietary) veganism has increased. This is only partially powered by growth in the US if there is any at all. Instead, a number of countries in Asia is likely a key contributor to this recent increase.
Author's Note
The difference between dietary and ethical vegan trends has possible practical implications for vegan activists. Dietary veganism as a trend does not appear very stable. While it may grow fast, it can decline even faster. Ethical veganism on the other hand is more stable and a long-term trend to benefit the vegan movement, as well as the animals.
We believe that an accurate understanding of the world is the best way to improve it. Our understanding of the world alone will not make it better however. It requires everyone to act on that understanding as well. In general, science is on veganism’s side: whether that be on animal ethics (yes, they are conscious and feel pain [13]), environmental impact (which is significant [14]) and disease risks (think of antibiotic resistance and pandemic risks [15]) of animal farming, and possible gains on human health (e.g. a whole foods plant based diet supports weight loss and lowers cardiovascular disease risk [16]). To act on this understanding is to go vegan.
Supplementary Materials
