A glowing search bar reflecting the world’s most-asked Google questions in 2025.
Credit : Gabriele Paoletti, Shutterstock
If you want to know what people are really thinking about in 2025, you don’t need a pollster. You just need Google.
Every month, billions of searches are typed, swiped or spoken into that little box. And when you zoom out and look at the questions that keep coming back, the picture is surprisingly human: a mix of boredom, money worries, confusion about tech, and a lot of “how on earth do I do this?”.
For this article, we’ve crossed two big data sources – Link-Assistant (RankDots) and Semrush – to build a ‘best possible’ top 10. The exact rankings and volumes change slightly depending on the tool, but the same questions keep bubbling to the surface.
Here’s what the world is asking – and what it says about us.
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“What to watch” – boredom, choice and the endless scroll
Top of the Semrush list is a very modern problem: “What to watch”, with around 6.2 million searches a month worldwide.
It’s the question you ask when you’ve already been scrolling through Netflix, Disney+ and YouTube for 15 minutes and still haven’t picked anything. There’s too much choice, not enough time, and a lot of fear of wasting an evening on something terrible.
In 2025, Google isn’t just a search engine here – it’s the referee in an endless battle between streaming platforms and your shrinking attention span.
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“What is my IP address?” / “What’s my IP?” – the internet’s ID card
Things get more technical in second place.
Link-Assistant puts “What is my IP address?” at number one globally, with roughly 3.4 million searches a month. Semrush shows “What’s my IP” in third position with about 3.2 million monthly searches. Different wording, same intent: “What’s my digital label right now?”
People aren’t just curious. They’re checking VPNs, trying to access region-locked content, troubleshooting work connections or worrying about who can see what. It’s a small question that sits right at the heart of online privacy, piracy, and remote work.
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“Where’s my refund?” – money, stress and waiting for a payment
Money anxiety also tops the charts.
According to Semrush, “Where’s my refund?” sits in second place with around 3.4 million monthly searches. Link-Assistant lists the same question in seventh position, with about 1.8 million searches a month – lower in rank, but still firmly in the global top 10.
Whether it’s tax rebates, online orders, travel refunds or benefits, millions of people are clearly refreshing their banking apps and turning to Google when the money doesn’t land. Behind those few words you can almost hear the stress: “I need that cash. What’s going on?”
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“What time is it?” – the tiny question with a global life
This one sounds almost silly until you think about how we work now.
Link-Assistant places “What time is it?” in second place with about 2.9 million monthly searches. Semrush still has it in the top tier, but a bit lower, around seventh position with 1.4 million searches.
It’s rarely just someone too lazy to look at the corner of their screen. It’s people working across time zones, trying to join a meeting in London from Madrid, or tune into a live event in New York from Málaga. “What time is it?” really means “What time is it there?”.
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“Que significa” – the multilingual side of Google
One of the most interesting entries is entirely in Spanish: “que significa” (“what does [X] mean?”).
Semrush ranks it fourth worldwide, with around 2.9 million searches a month. It’s a reminder that global search data isn’t only about English. People are constantly asking Google to translate slang, song lyrics, legal terms and bureaucratic jargon into something they actually understand.
In other words, search isn’t just a dictionary. It’s a real-time language and culture bridge.
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“How to tie a tie?” – the classic that never dies
Some questions simply refuse to go away.
Link-Assistant puts “How to tie a tie?” in third place globally, with roughly 2.3 million monthly searches. Every year there’s a fresh wave of school leavers, new employees and wedding guests who suddenly realise they’ve never mastered the Windsor knot.
You can picture it: someone standing in front of a mirror, phone propped up on the sink, pausing the same 10-second clip again and again. The internet may be full of AI chatbots and crypto charts, but some of its biggest hits are still about knots and neckwear.
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“What is AI?” – hype, fear and curiosity
In 2025, it’s no shock that AI has forced its way into the rankings.
Link-Assistant lists “What is AI?” in fourth position, with around 2.2 million searches each month. That’s not just students revising for exams. It’s office workers wondering what automation means for their jobs, small business owners unsure whether to jump on the AI bandwagon, and ordinary users who feel the world changed overnight.
The most-clicked results tend to be short explainers, not dense white papers. People aren’t looking for equations – they just want someone to speak human.
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“How to lose weight fast” – health, pressure and quick fixes
Somewhere between health and panic sits “How to lose weight fast”.
Link-Assistant ranks it fifth globally with roughly 2 million monthly searches. The wording matters here. The word “fast” says a lot about the pressure people feel: summer holidays, weddings, social media filters, and tight clothes that don’t fit after Christmas.
Doctors wince at this one, because it often pushes people towards extreme diets and miracle products. Yet at the same time, there’s a quiet rise in more sustainable searches – strength training, balanced meal plans, long-term habits – running alongside it.
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“When is Easter 2025?” – the calendar rules everything
Then there are the questions that quietly organise our lives.
Link-Assistant puts ‘When is Easter 2025?’ in sixth place, with about 1.9 million monthly searches. It’s not just churchgoers. Families are planning holidays, retailers are planning promotions, airlines are nudging up prices, and teachers are thinking about school breaks.
Google has become the global calendar everyone agrees on. If it says Easter falls then, that’s when travel plans and chocolate sales follow.
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The everyday stuff: screenshots, weather and tiny tasks
Rounding out the top tier are the questions that grease the wheels of daily life.
Link-Assistant shows “How to screenshot on Windows?” in eighth place with around 1.7 million searches, and “What is the weather today?” just behind it in ninth, at roughly 1.6 million.
They may not sound dramatic, but together they’re huge. Every new laptop user needs to grab screenshots. Every person planning a barbecue, school run or beach day checks the forecast. It’s all the little jobs that quietly add up to millions of searches.
Same questions, different numbers
So which list is “right”: Link-Assistant’s or Semrush’s?
The honest answer is that both are, within the limits of their own data. Each tool uses its own keyword database and modelling, so the exact positions and monthly volumes differ. But when you put them side by side, the same questions keep appearing: what to watch, where’s my refund, what’s my IP, what time is it, how to tie a tie, what is AI, how to lose weight fast, and so on.
Taken together, they paint a strangely intimate portrait of life in 2025. We’re overwhelmed by streaming choices, worried about money, confused by tech, curious about AI, anxious about our bodies, and forever checking the weather and the calendar.
And for all of that, we still turn to the same place: a white search box, a blinking cursor, and a question we hope someone – or something – can finally answer.
