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Tom Jones

Singer d4vd has been named the top trending person on Google in 2025

If you were asked to name the person who saw the biggest spike in Google searches across 2025, you might plump for a pope, perhaps, or a major political figure. Unless you were one particular Polymarket user, you maybe wouldn’t have put too much money on d4vd, a popular 20-year-old singer who reportedly remains an active suspect in the death of a teen girl.

However, when Google revealed its Year in Search 2025 today — a feature that, importantly, seems to reflect the figures and topics that have seen searches spike from last year, rather than overall search volume — d4vd, whose hits like “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” have racked up billions of Spotify streams, sat atop the “People” section, beating Kendrick Lamar for the top spot.

Google’s top trending people
Google’s Year in Search 2025

As people in the business of making charts all day, you could say that we’re pretty au fait with Google Trends data. Even so, we can admit that Polymarket user 0xafEe may be a true savant when it comes to understanding what people are using the search engine for (though there are also allegations that the user is a Google insider or had other access to the information).

In any case, thanks to a series of what are now proving to be very prescient positions on Polymarket’s “#1 Searched Person on Google This Year” market, 0xafEe has made a medium fortune in the last 24 hours. There was a ~$10,600 “yes” position on d4vd himself — now worth more than $200,000 — as well as “no” positions across other candidates for the title, such as Donald Trump, Pope Leo, and Bianca Censori, all of which have profited substantially. All told, 0xafEe made just shy of $1.2 million on the market.

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Tom Jones6/29/26
culture
Tom Jones

The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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