Black Culture Dominates Google’s Year in Search 2025

Google’s Year in Search 2025 data confirms a long-standing reality in the digital economy. Black American culture serves as the primary engine for what the U.S. clicks, buys, and watches. This annual roundup highlights the questions that shaped the cultural zeitgeist, and 2025’s results are characterized by Black-led moments across every major category.

Culture

The rise of the Philadelphia-rooted “67” phrase—popularized by rapper Skrilla’s track “Doot Doot (6 7)”—highlights how regional Black slang quickly becomes the default language of the internet. Dictionary.com even named “67” its Word of the Year for 2025, following the viral success of the “Shedeur Sanders Effect.” Sanders ranked as the number one trending athlete of the year, signaling a shift where NIL visibility is converted into long-term commercial ownership.

Film / TV

In the film sector, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners dominated trending searches. The film’s success as a top-searched movie and a fixture on Google’s “Explained” list proves that audiences are hungry for layered, Black-led psychological thrillers.

Simultaneously, Black-owned platforms such as the Zeus Network leveraged the Baddies franchise to dominate reunion-related searches, outperforming legacy networks in sustaining consistent audience attention.

Why This Matters

Black culture driving search demand is more than just social influence. It represents unpaid R&D for the global digital economy. The signals captured by Google are used to train recommendation systems, dictate ad spend, and inform product planning for multinational corporations. For Black and Brown professionals, this data is a power map.

When Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour causes a surge in retail searches, it creates a massive opening for Black-owned brands to capture that demand. The digital economy is built on Black attention; the future winners will be those who control the intellectual property and the commerce rails behind that attention.