Google Trends Artefacts

29 May 2026

Diving further into the unexplained peak from the last post, there is mechanism that could explain it. This is an artefact from Google's sampling that is stronger for low frequency terms. Such an artefact would survive the correcting of the stem for vegan searches. E.g. both "vegan dress" and "dress" peak in April 2026. Because "vegan X" will pretty much always be a lower frequency search than simply "X", this exaggerates the vegan search terms more. Even more specifically, non-dietary terms used tend to be lower frequency than the dietary ones, explaining that discrepancy as well. In other words, the data since February may be unreliable. Hopefully, this will be limited to the specific months and recover going forward.

Let's have a look at "shirt" and different colours and types. This shows two peaks, one in February and one in April. "Shirt" is searched far more often than any specific search like "red shirt". Different colours and "dress shirt" are searched at different frequencies and also show the two peaks at the same time. What is different, is the relative magnitude of the peaks: For "shirt", these are just under double the long term trend. For the more specific searches, the peaks are about 2.5 to 4 times the long term trend.

Diving deeper into specific countries reveals further detail. The United States shows the largest peaks and most pronounced in April. The UK has a relatively smaller peak specifically to February. Other English speaking countries appear to follow the UK's pattern here. Of course, more or other patterns might be hiding in non-English speaking countries' data too, though all countries manually checked seemed to follow the February peak.

Continued and Too Much Growth

8 May 2026

A couple months back, there was a huge peak in non-dietary vegan term searches not matched by dietary ones, suggesting an increase especially in ethical vegans. This is continuing to skyrocket to heights that suggest a dramatic rise even if only partially reflective of the true number of vegans.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. And a 9x increase over a year definitely looks too good. Yet at this point we haven't found any artefact that can explain it. E.g. the pattern seems to be consistent for both types of searches. All dietary terms were about stable or with a modest increase, while all non-dietary ones rose dramatically. Any issue in the method would be expected to show up in a similar way for both. This peak also only appeared after the first analysis, so there was no bias for selecting this method to get such a result. We'll look deeper into this in the future.

Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand

9 April 2026

Here is the trend for Canada. This roughly follows the US, UK, and Australian patterns, still pointing to a recent increase in non-dietary terms. Data for Ireland and New Zealand was insufficient to get an estimate for non-dietary trends.

More Terms and Broader Baseline Equals: More Countries

18 March 2026

Updated Method

Specific countries have fewer vegan terms with enough sampled data in the year 2010. This disqualifies many terms and shrinks the used pool of terms to a handful, making the data hardly usable. With a couple of changes the UK and Australia now have their own country specific plots. These countries show roughly the same pattern as the US and worldwide ones.

The first update is to use more search terms, to get 18 for each dietary and non-dietary conditions. See the updated lists attached below.

The second update is the time frame used to normalise on. Originally, this was the average of the year 2010. However, this is the year with the least amount of data. That in turn requires filtering out terms that have more than a few data points at 0 out, to avoid these having an outsized and noisy influence on the average of all terms. Instead, the entire range's average is used to normalise on now, and that in turn allows for years worth of 0 data points. For these graphs, a maximum of 24 data points at 0 is allowed for the country specific graphs.

Larger list - dietary-terms.txt

Larger list - non-dietary-terms.txt

For an analysis of various fabrics and how they compare, see this resource.

March Global Update & per Country Investigation

7 March 2026

Analysis

Recently, interest in non-dietary veganism has gone up. This trends starts in August 2025 and is still ongoing. It seems mostly driven by non-dietary terms, suggesting ethical veganism to be growing faster than interest in vegan diets alone. The recent up-tick may be driven by non-English speaking countries. Individual countries lack sufficient data on Google Trends for the detailed analysis done above. We can still compare searches for the term "vegan" for most countries. The change in usage of this term per country suggests that interest in veganism has mostly come from non-English speaking countries in the last year.

Veganism’s Popularity - US Data

2 March 2026

Summary

The trends in the US are similar in some and different in others 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.

Veganism’s Popularity - Global Update

30 December 2025

Summary

The popularity of vegan search terms on Google Trends shows a new increase in August 2025. This increase is most dramatic in non-dietary terms, which all show it to some degree, with "vegan dress" being especially dramatic.

Analysis

Most terms display the same new peak, with the exception of some dietary ones. A quick investigation did not find a satisfactory explanation of the new peak for worldwide searches. The same increase is not seen in US-only or UK-only data. Note the the UK data is limited, making conclusions on it less reliable. A manual check for the most popular veganised search terms found no other geography available with sufficient sampled data.

Further Data