From Ghibli-style AI art to ‘Grok explain’: top 10 Google AI searches in India in 2025

Google’s flagship AI model was unsurprisingly the year’s biggest trend. Gemini became synonymous with everyday productivity, powering search, Workspace, and even Android’s “AI Mode”.

In India, its multilingual capability and support for regional languages made it especially popular. Students, content creators, and professionals all used Gemini for summarising PDFs, generating notes, writing emails, coding, and even travel planning.

If there was one AI feature that went viral in 2025, it was Google’s Gemini AI photo tool. It lets users enhance, fix, or fully redesign photos using natural-language prompts. In a country where every wedding, festival, or get-together is captured in photos, the appeal was immediate. People used it to recreate memories—enhancing old photos, remaking selfies, even playfully tinkering with reality. The result was a wave of social media posts, debates about authenticity, and a lot of clicks.

X’s AI chatbot, Grok—positioned as the irreverent, meme-coded alternative to formal AI assistants—saw huge growth in India. For every query, doubt, people only had a simple prompt: “@Grok explain.” Grok’s humorous, sometimes edgy responses drove millions of Indians to test it out, especially during major news moments.

Chinese AI model DeepSeek emerged as 2025’s surprise entry globally just for a simple reason—its power-to-cost ratio. The rapid rise of the startup, fuelled by endorsements from tech heavyweights, also led to widespread searches, as users, investors, and the media were highly interested in the company and its implications for the future of AI.

Perplexity AI redefined how Indians searched for information in 2025, offering real-time citations, conversational results, and instant summaries. Google AI Studio also became widely searched as India’s developer ecosystem boomed. The high search volume for Google AI Studio in 2025 resulted from increased interest in AI tools and its role as the main platform for developers to access the Gemini API, the programming interface.

Even as newer models emerged, ChatGPT remained one of the most recognisable AI names, and one of the most searched. The arrival of GPT-5 and its multimodal enhancements further revived interest.

One of the most delightful trends of 2025 was India’s obsession with Ghibli-style AI art. People used ChatGPT’s image generation to transform: travel photos into dreamy anime scenes, couple portraits into Ghibli-style frames, and festival photos into soft, cinematic sketches. Instagram and Pinterest made it viral, turning this niche creative format into a mainstream trend.

Here’s a list of the top 10 most-searched AI topics in India in 2025: