How to Track Search Trends Across Google, AI Platforms, and Social Media

If you’re not mapping trends across AI, social, and search right now, you’re bleeding the market. 

In 2025, audiences discover, explore, and validate information across search engines, AI platforms, and social-first platforms. Each of these has its speed and pattern of adoption.

Trends now break on Instagram, get unpacked on ChatGPT, compared on Gemini, and only then get formalised through Google searches. By the time your SEO dashboards light up, the most valuable engagement windows may already have passed.

Today, search engineering has become essential to understand how each platform’s role shapes the timing and type of audience engagement you get.

For marketers, understanding where and when a trend peaks is critical. If you wait for Google’s data, you are already late to the conversation. 

Why Trends Behave Differently on Each Platform?

Each platform has a unique discovery-to-adoption cycle:

• Visual-first platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest spark trends with short-form, shareable content.
  
  
• AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity accelerate trend curiosity by answering “what is” and “how to” questions faster than search engines.
  
  
• Search engines such as Google and Bing reflect mainstream adoption, where people look for deep guides, product lists, and comparisons.
  
  

People arrive on these platforms when they want in‑depth guides, product lists and comparisons. If you only watch one part of this ecosystem, you will miss the early signals.

In 2025, user search is splitting between AI chat, traditional search, and platform discovery. AI platforms are already shaping buying decisions before Google searches happen. CMOs must track these shifts early to stay ahead of competitors. 

Here is a table to understand the evolving user search behaviour in 2025 with strategic actions. 

What’s Happening with the User Search Behaviour? Why It Matters for CMOs & Marketing Leaders? 

What these numbers make clear is that while AI platforms are becoming central to how trends spread and how people explore new ideas, trust and depth still pull users toward established search engines and credible sources. 

For marketers and search engineers, this means strategy can’t live in silos, you can’t focus only on SEO, or only on AI prompts, or only on social virality. Instead, the winning approach in 2025 is to map your audience’s entire search journey, from social media to AI platforms and Google.

The Search Engineering Approach: Step-by-Step

At FTA Global, we map trend evolution like this:

Caselet: “Summer Skincare Routine”

At FTA global, we tracked the spread of “summer skincare routine” across five platforms over six weeks. We used a trend intensity score (0–100) where 100 represents the platform’s peak search volume or engagement during our study.

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This table tells only part of the story. The following chart visualises how the trend evolved week by week. Notice how the AI‑driven platforms sit squarely between the social spark and Google’s mainstream surge.

This pattern is not unique to beauty trends. Across industries, we see the same rhythm, a social spark, an AI-driven curiosity phase, and a search engine adoption stage.

How Search Timelines Differ Across Platforms?

Here is the trend lifecycle visual for “summer skincare routine”:

• Instagram sparks visual discovery first.
  
  
• AI platforms capture and expand user curiosity.
  
  
• Google reflects full adoption weeks later.
  
  

Understanding where and when a trend peaks is only half the story. The other half is knowing how user behaviour is shifting in this new search ecosystem. The days of typing a few keywords into Google and calling it a search are fading fast. Users now blend visual discovery, conversational queries, and AI-assisted exploration into a single, fluid search journey.

How to track Google search trends with real data?

Start with the basics. Google is still the place where intent becomes mainstream. Use Google Trends to understand how a topic is trending in the broader market, and use Search Console to see how that demand reaches your properties.

For Google Trends, keep an eye out for - 

1. Choose a primary topic rather than a single exact keyword.
   
   
2. Compare regions that matter to your business.
   
   
3. Track interest over time and mark campaign launches, product releases, and peak moments.
   
   

For Search Console, keep these in mind - 

1. Filter by the same topic and related queries.
   
   
2. Track impressions and clicks by country and by device.
   
   
3. Watch for the gap between when Google Trends shows a rise and when your own impressions start to move.
   
   

When that gap is large, the market is ahead of your content. When your impressions move early, you know your search engineering is anticipatory rather than reactive.

How to track AI search trends across LLM platforms?

AI search behaves differently from traditional search, and the measurement layer is younger. You will not get a single neat column that says AI overview impressions yet. Instead, build a set of practical signals.

In GA4, create a custom channel group for AI traffic. Start by tagging obvious AI referrers such as direct links from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or similar assistants. Once you have a clean AI channel, you can answer these simple questions - 

1. Which AI platforms send visitors who actually stay and convert
   
   
2. Which pages or topics attract AI referrals
   
   
3. How AI traffic performs compared with classic organic search

On the visibility side, use Search Console to monitor queries that are more likely to trigger AI overviews, such as compound informational searches and complex comparisons. Pair that with third-party tools and logs that show when your pages are being cited in AI overviews or AI answer engines. The goal is not perfect precision. The goal is to see that AI search interest for a topic is rising and that your brand is present in that conversation.

How to track social search trends on different platforms?

Social platforms have quietly become search engines. People type questions into TikTok and Instagram, read deep threads on Reddit, and search inside YouTube instead of going to Google first.

For each priority platform - 

1. Use native analytics to track search-driven discovery. Look at search terms, suggested content, and watch time.
   
   
2. Layer social listening or AI-powered trend tools on top to see emerging phrases, not just the ones you already rank for.
   
   
3. Connect social trend spikes to your site analytics. When a topic spikes on TikTok, you should see a related movement in direct, branded, or AI-assisted searches within a few days.

If social and AI signals are heating up around a topic today, your long-form search content and landing pages for that topic should already be in production, not sitting in a backlog.

How to build a single search trends dashboard for CMOs?

Put everything on one screen. A CMO does not need twenty different reports. They need a simple, repeatable view that answers three questions

1. What is the market curious about right now across Google, AI, and social media?
   
   
2. Where are we visible and cited
   
   
3. How is that visibility turning into a pipeline?
   
   

Design a monthly search trends dashboard with four blocks - 

1. Market-level trends from Google Trends and leading AI search reports.
   
   
2. AI search indicators such as AI channel traffic, AI-related queries, and citations.
   
   
3. Social search indicators from TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.
   
   
4. Outcome metrics that matter for the board, such as opportunities opened, pipeline sourced, and revenue influenced.
   
   

Review it on a fixed cadence with search, content, product, and sales in the room. That is how trend tracking moves from a dashboard hobby to a growth habit.

Searching beyond SEO

The takeaway for 2025 is simple: SEO alone is no longer enough. The future belongs to Search Engineers who can read cross-platform patterns, act before the mainstream, and create content that ranks in Google, gets cited by AI, and travels on social.

Your brand needs to speak to each stage of that journey. Read the room on Instagram and TikTok, answer questions on ChatGPT and Copilot, and then deliver authoritative content for Google. That’s how you get ahead of the conversation instead of reacting to it.

We create AI-optimised, citation-worthy content during the Curiosity and Exploration stage of the user, so by the time Adoption hits Google, we’re already visible in both AI answers and search rankings.