On 9th March 2026, a new Google Trends‑based analysis titled “Interest in veganism since 2010 – Google Trends Analysis” estimated that the global interest in veganism has risen 3.8 times over the last 16 years, after adjusting for how popular particular keywords are over time. The report from Stisca notes that this level is slightly below a peak of 3.9 times at the end of 2019, suggesting that the high point just before 2020 has receded only marginally.
The authors use “rich and fine‑grained” Google Trends data, focusing on search pairs in which a common term, such as “jacket,” is matched with its veganised version, “vegan jacket,” and then compare the relative volumes over time to infer how interest linked to vegans may have shifted. This approach is applied globally and, where data allow, to individual countries.
A key feature of the analysis is the split between dietary and non‑dietary search terms, which the authors use as proxies for people mainly interested in vegan diets and those whose behaviour reflects broader ethical veganism. They report that dietary terms peaked at 4.8 times their 2010 baseline in January 2020 before dropping to 2.1 times and then rising again to 2.8 times, while non‑dietary terms reached 5 times their 2010 level by February 2026, the highest point in the series. The report states that this suggests separate trends for terms tracking ethical vegans and those tracking people focused on vegan diets only. The analysis also explores where the latest surge is coming from. Using a second approach that tracks changes in searches for the single term “vegan” over the last year, it finds that 80 out of 103 countries with sufficient data show growth above 5%, and that the average change is +44.4%, with especially strong increases in parts of Asia and the Middle East, including Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, and Pakistan. In contrast, English‑speaking countries and much of Western Europe show changes under 5%, which the authors interpret as indicating no clear growth or decline there. The report concludes that, taken together, these two methods support the notion that interest in veganism has increased globally over 16 years, with the most recent growth particularly strong for non‑dietary, ethical veganism, and largely driven by non‑English speaking countries.
