‘Buy Crypto’ Google Searches Hit Yearly Highs: Is Retail Coming Back?

The searches specifically for BTC are also quite high, but not as those for the entire industry.

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.