Data from Google Trends shows that Google users are far more interested in looking up artificial intelligence (AI) than “bitcoin” or “cryptocurrency” this year.
Since 2020, search interest in “bitcoin” and occasionally “cryptocurrency” has surpassed search interest in “artificial intelligence,” but this started to reverse around August 2022, according to Google.
Search volume for “AI” exploded around November 2022, the same month OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched, and has since widened the gap with crypto-related search terms. Global search interest for “artificial intelligence” currently scores 91 on Google Trends, compared to 22 for Bitcoin. Google scores search terms on a scale from 0 to 100 based on the proportion of total searches a topic represents across all topics.
The results may not be surprising, as Bitcoin During the second half of 2021 and much of 2022, the company continued to suffer from the tail end of a bear market cycle. However, it started to regain lost ground this year. Bitcoin started the year at $16,900, well below its all-time high of $68,729 on Nov. 11, 2021, but has since risen about 150% to $43,400 at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap.
Google Trends shows that El Salvador, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Brazil and Switzerland are most interested in Bitcoin. Crypto X (formerly Twitter) user Autism Capital was one of the first to point out the trend in a post to his 249,900 followers on December 26.
One comment on the post suggests that the discrepancy is due to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies being a relatively old interest compared to artificial intelligence — meaning people have been looking up the crypto term extensively in previous years. Artificial intelligence also emerged as a clear winner among job seekers in July, according to analysis by crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.
The study found that the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 led to a spike in searches for "artificial intelligence jobs" that were four times higher than searches for "crypto jobs."
