Google Trends Shift: AI Surpasses Crypto in User Interest

According to the statistics provided by Google Trends, this year, users of Google were far more interested in searching for artificial intelligence (AI) than they were in searching for “Bitcoin” or “crypto.”

Since the year 2020, the interest in searching for “Bitcoin” and, on occasion, “crypto” has been able to surpass that of searching for “AI.” However, according to the statistics provided by Google, this began to change around August 2022.

Search interest in AI far outpaced that of crypto or Bitcoin in 2023. Source: Google Trends

In November 2022, the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT coincided with an increase in searches for “AI”. Since then, the gap between AI-related search terms and crypto-related search terms has grown. Currently, “AI” has a search interest score of 91 on Google Trends, while Bitcoin is ranked at 22.

Google assigns a score between 0 and 100 to search phrases based on the percentage of total searches conducted across all themes. As Bitcoin has continued to suffer from the tail end of a bear market cycle that has lasted for the later part of 2021 and the majority of 2022, the results may not come as a surprise to anyone. Within this year, however, it started to make up for the ground that it had lost.

According to the statistics provided by CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin started the year at $16,900, which is a significant decrease from its all-time high of $68,729 on November 11, 2021. However, since then, it has gained over 150% to reach a price of $43,400 at the time of publication.

According to Google Trends, the countries representing the highest level of interest in Bitcoin are El Salvador, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Switzerland.

Google search interest in ‘Bitcoin,’ sorted by country. Source: Google Trends

However, developments in artificial intelligence during the same year were remarkable, encompassing a proliferation of AI nude services, concerns about AI replacing actors’ jobs, and the excitement surrounding new chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Bard, Meta AI, and GrokAI, the latter being launched by tech billionaire Elon Musk. All of these developments occurred in the same year.

According to statistics from Google Trends, people in Vietnam, China, the Philippines, and Myanmar have a strong interest in artificial intelligence. A user of Crypto X (formerly known as Twitter), Autism Capital, brought attention to the trend in a post sent out on December 26 to their 249,900 followers.

Google search interest in ‘AI,’ sorted by country. Source: Google Trends

As a result of the fact that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are a comparatively older focus of interest in comparison to artificial intelligence, one of the comments on the post stated that the gap was because people had previously thoroughly searched the phrases associated with cryptocurrency in previous years.

According to research conducted by CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data aggregator, artificial intelligence emerged as the clear winner among job searchers in July.

According to the findings, the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 increased the number of searches for “AI jobs,” which was four times higher than the number of searches for “crypto jobs.”