Google Trends Show Bitcoin Searches Halved in Popularity Since 2021 Bull Run

Bitcoin is halfway through its second decade and the 20th anniversary is not far away. During this period, the crypto world has also undergone unpredictable changes.

As Bitcoin approaches its 20th anniversary and the halfway point of its second decade, the crypto landscape has witnessed remarkable shifts driven by market sentiment, political strategies, and the bull-bear market cycle.

Despite these fluctuations, new users continue to enter the crypto world through diverse channels. Among them, which entry path has garnered the most attention? Let’s uncover the answer in this piece.

1. Common Keywords

To gain insights into the evolving user interests, I analyzed Google Trends over the past five years, covering both bull and bear market cycles for an objective perspective.

People often search for broad concepts like “cryptocurrency,” “blockchain,” and “token.” As expected, searches for these keywords are directly proportional to the market’s upward movement.

However, these searches don’t indicate intent. For a deeper understanding, let’s examine intent-based searches.

Throughout history, the primary use cases of cryptocurrencies have been trading, investing, and speculating. Airdrops follow closely behind, but not as closely as the recently hot “trade” and “invest” keywords. Nonetheless, passive income remains a topic of interest among crypto-savvy users.

2. Transaction-Related Queries

While we’re at it, let’s take it a step further and uncover user brand awareness and key entry paths.

The attention paid by users to topics relating to CEX (centralized exchanges) and DEX (decentralized exchanges) reflects the dominance of CEX trading volume over DEX trading volume. Despite varying opinions, DeFi still constitutes a small portion of the wider crypto market, and centralized exchanges like Binance in this part of the market are not to be underestimated.

Key observations:

3. Token Search Dynamics

In terms of token searches, the popularity of the word “crypto” is rivaled only by “Bitcoin,” which serves as the main query term for crypto-related topics.

Search interest for Bitcoin peaked during the 2021 bull run and reached its lowest point at the end of 2019. Even after Bitcoin first hit the $100,000 price point in late 2024, it failed to regain its former popularity.

Meanwhile, query frequency for other top market cap tokens, such as Ethereum, has remained relatively stable, though XRP has seen a significant increase following its recent rally.

4. Narrative Heat

When comparing user interest in major verticals like DeFi, RWA, DePIN, GameFi, and the recently popular AI x Crypto, we observe that interest in the first two is sustainable. In contrast, other fields are more heavily dependent on hype.

Recently, interest in the RWA and AI x Crypto space has surged, while DePIN, DeFi, and GameFi still take a backseat.

Meme Coins are exploding in popularity, reaching all-time highs by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, AI-related tokens are gathering attention, with March 2024 being a critical moment.

5. Keywords for 2024

Now that we have a general idea of the current interest and main attention projects in Web3, let me share the most popular search queries in the crypto space right now (sorted by search query volume).

Here’s a ranking of the largest Web3 brands:

Searches for all other brands, including those frequently discussed on Crypto Twitter like Vitruals, Ethena, or any of the L2 chains, pale in comparison to the above brands.

What does this tell us?

Most topics discussed on Crypto Twitter don’t reach a global audience. Retail investors still join the crypto world through centralized exchanges, and DeFi captures only a small portion of crypto interest. Many of today’s hot brands are still beyond the retail audience.