Let’s start with a quick disclaimer – we used to write a lot of similar articles several years ago. The reason was simple: searches on Google typically show the demand for the cryptocurrency industry among retail investors. After all, institutions don’t go to the world’s largest search engine to ask about buying BTC or altcoins. They have their own methods.
However, the tide has turned since then, as retail investors have shown a different attitude. The charts we will display in this article prove that the actual Google queries about BTC or crypto as a whole plummeted, especially during bear market years. Now, though, there’s an interesting change.
Buy Crypto Is Back
The first chart below shows that ‘buy crypto’ searches plummeted at the end of 2021 – right at the time when BTC and the alts were charting then-ATHs, and went below 20 for over a year; yes, it coincided with the bear market. They picked up slightly in May 2024 (as prices soared), dropped again as the market cooled, and jumped high at year-end when BTC and the alts were booming after the US presidential elections.
Another decline followed in mid-2025 as the market experienced a fresh drop, and it surged to a five-year high in August. Shortly after, bitcoin marked a new (and its latest) all-time high of just over $126,000. After the October 2025 crash, the leading cryptocurrency went into a 10-11-month-long bear market, in which searches for ‘buy crypto’ decreased significantly.
The yearly bottom came in July when BTC slumped to under $58,000, and most alts struggled just as much. Since then, though, the searches have risen sharply and are projected to beat the 2026 record in October. Needless to say, prices have recovered, and we are far from the recent lows. In other words: the retail pattern has repeated perfectly again.
What About Bitcoin?
The landscape around BTC itself is less straightforward. The ‘buy bitcoin’ searches were below 40 on average for four straight years – from late 2021 to late 2025. Even the US elections couldn’t really break that negative streak. They finally picked up in August 2025, just a few months before BTC’s rise to $126,000, dipped again by January, before suddenly soaring to a new multi-year peak in February.
That was a one-month thing, as the queries quickly dropped to 40-50 for the next few months. Although they jumped again in September, the October projections are quite different than those for ‘buy crypto,’ as current Google Trends data shows a massive decline toward 20. As such, it’s somewhat safe to determine that even if retail is indeed coming back, they are not looking specifically for BTC.
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