Who Will Be Google’s #1 Actor of 2025? Here's how we know...

With 2025 coming to its end, we will soon see the resolution of many Polymarket events, including the "Google's Most Searched" series. In this article I want to focus on the "#1 Searched Actor on Google This Year" market. Unlike the "#1 Searched Person" or "#1 Searched Passing," this one does not have a clear favorite. The top option trades at only 35 percent, which means there is a chance to grab a pretty solid profit if you manage to guess the winner.

Instead of blindly guessing, I want to bring at least some analysis to the table. We will take a look at how Google describes its methodology behind crafting these rankings and also explore previous years' winners and nominees. I do not expect this analysis to magically reveal the winner, but it should help make our bets more well-founded and give us some edge over people who are simply betting on their favorite celeb. I will ignore the names themselves and try to look purely at the numbers.

How does Google design their ranking?

To answer this, we need to look at this short article from Google, where they give a quick explanation of their approach:

According to this article, the worldwide rankings are based on Google Trends data from January 1 to roughly late November of each year. Google focuses on trending searches, meaning the biggest spikes in interest compared to the previous year. They also mention that "breakout" queries are ones that grew more than 5000 percent year over year. In addition, searches from China, Iran, and Russia are not counted in the global results.

So Google is not purely tallying total search numbers. They are looking at the highest spike in popularity compared to the previous year. That is useful. Even though we do not have the exact coefficients needed to turn this into an equation that spits out the winner, we can at least look at previous years and see how close the correlation is.

2024

Here is the list of the Google's top 5 trending actors in 2024:

1. Katt Williams
2. Pawan Kalyan
3. Adam Brody
4. Ella Purnell
5. Hina Khan

Now let's see how their search interest compares over the period from 01/01/2023 to 11/23/2024.

The correlation is pretty straightforward. The higher the trendline spikes on the graph, the higher the actor appears on Google's list. Let's go one year back and see if this pattern holds.

2023

Google's Year in Search ranking:

1. Jeremy Renner
2. Jenna Ortega
3. 市川 猿之助 (Ichikawa Ennosuke IV)
4. Danny Masterson
5. Pedro Pascal

Once again, the pattern is clear. Even though Jenna Ortega had more consistent interest throughout the year, she still ranked lower than Jeremy Renner, who had a massive spike in early January 2023.

2022

To double check our observations, let's go one year further back and look at 2022:

1. Johnny Depp
2. Will Smith
3. Amber Heard
4. Chris Rock
5. Jada Pinkett Smith

Here we finally see the pattern break a bit. Even though Will Smith had a bigger spike in interest, he was still ranked lower than Johnny Depp. The same applies to Chris Rock compared to Amber Heard. This likely happened because the spike for Smith and Rock lasted for only about one week at the end of May, and the interest faded quickly.

2025

Now that we have looked at the previous three years, let's take a look at the 2025 graph and see if we can recognize similar patterns. I will compare the top 5 options on Polymarket using data from Jan 1 2024 to the moment of writing this article, which is Nov 16 2025. There are still seven days left that will count toward Google's calculations, but it is unlikely that a major new spike will appear in such a short time.

Sydney Sweeney is the clear favorite here, with the highest trendline on the graph. She is trading at only 34 percent on Polymarket, and that is because her year over year growth is not as dramatic as the growth for Saif Ali Khan or Mikey Madison. So whether she ends up at #1 depends on how much weight Google gives to continuous interest compared to year over year momentum. Since the exact weighting is not disclosed and cannot be measured precisely, I still think buying "Sydney Sweeney - Yes" at 35c is a pretty good deal from a risk and reward point of view.

However, the best option in my opinion is to buy "Mikey Madison - No," which trades at around 80c. It will not give you the same massive ROI, but the bet looks much more solid. If you look at the graph, it's hard to imagine her landing at #1 in either of these scenarios:

Scenario 1: Absolute numbers and continuous interest matter more than short-term spikes.If this is the case, Sydney Sweeney should win easily.

Scenario 2: Year over year growth carries more weight. Even then, the most likely winner is Saif Ali Khan, who shows a much stronger gain compared to 2024–2025 and whose trendline peaks higher on the Google Trends chart.

Closing Notes

This article was written to give you some insight into how these Google rankings behave and how you might approach the Polymarket actor market with a bit more strategy instead of pure guesswork. It is not financial advice and should not be treated as such. It is simply meant to help you think about the data behind the market before placing your bets. Good luck, and may your positions print.