Cycling exists in its own little bubble. Those within it are really in it, while many of those outside it see it as an indecipherable and eccentric sport or activity – and worse, it’s full of technical jargon, foreign terms and names, and funny clothing. Most of the time these two worlds interact through fleeting encounters on the road and on screens, but it’s rare to get a glimpse of what really drives interest in cycling, especially on a global scale.
But (un?)luckily there is a vast tech monolith that’s got its finger on the pulse – the world’s leading search engine, Google. In fact, you can dip in and dabble in its trends whenever you like, checking in on the big movers and shakers among search terms on a given theme; you can even filter those searches by location, from worldwide down to country down to state and city. That gives an opportunity to wrap your head around what people are searching for – all sorts of people – and when. It’s then over to you to figure out why.
After a trawl through publicly available Google Trends data from across the past 12 months, these are some of the insights we found.
Much of the time, when you’re Googling something, you’re searching for the quick and the easy, the dumb and the obvious. You’re probably economical with your word choice, too: fewer keystrokes gives you the answers quicker. You’re not talking to a human, so you’re not being polite. Brevity means bluntness: instead of writing ‘hey Google, what are the best road cycling shoes?’, you just grunt ‘best bike shoes’ at it. And that’s fine. But it does mean that the top search results aren’t rich and vivid manifestos – they’re just people wanting to get something approximately informative into their brains as quickly as possible.
The top 10 related search queries on this theme are:
- Cycling bike [presumably as a differentiator from ‘motorbike’, but I still love the redundancy of this. Only way it could be better is if it said ‘bicycle cycling bike’]
- Road cycling
- Cycling shoes
- Cycling pro
- Cycling shorts
- Cycling Olympics
- Cycle
- Indoor cycling
- Cycling news [underlining the SEO brilliance of our friends over at CN]
- Cycling jersey
Now, make it visual
You can also search for different sub-categories of search – not just a Web search, but also a News search, say. The top related Image search queries associated with ‘cycling’ are:
- Bike
- Cycling bike
- Cycling jersey
- Cycling shorts
- Team
- Cycling team
- Road cycling
- Cycling logo [who’s asking this and why?]
- Swimming [something has gone wrong here, surely]
- Cycle
There’s not much deviation in the top 25 from these basic themes, I’m surprised how many people are searching for ‘cycling cartoon’ (#19) and ‘cycling drawing’ (#21) – but look, some people are just visual creatures. The fact that image searches for ‘cycling women’ come in at #18 feels like it’s probably at least partially driven by a pervy dude cohort (much as I’d like to hope that the sisterhood is looking for representation).
Regional variations
Google also gives an overview of interest by region. Calculated how? Not per capita or in absolute terms, but by which location the term was most popular in (the leading country is the one with the most popularity of the term as a fraction of total searches in that location, which is a bit of a tongue/brain twister).
Tadej Pogačar’s motherland Slovenia is top of the tree in this regard, followed by Belgium, the UK, Ireland and the New Zealanders (who are basically Australians, but nicer). Australia is at #7, with the US down at a not-very-American-Exceptionalism #17. Splitting it even further, the US state of Vermont is the most interested in cycling-related searches, closely followed by Colorado. Mississippi is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.
You can also toggle to include ‘low search volume regions’, under which Eritrea is the clear leader of the pack, vividly showing the star-power of Biniam Girmay. Isle of Man is in second place (but way behind) which I guess tells us that The People prefer Bini in Eritrea to Cav in the Isle of Man. Belgium (population: 12 million people) will be surprised to see itself in the ‘low search volume region’ table too, in fifth place, one ahead of Slovenia (population: 2.1 million), seeing as they’re both chronically online countries and right up there in Google Search’s ‘big country’ category too.
[Maybe my brain is dumb but the Google explainer for how this is all calculated makes my head hurt: “A higher value means a higher proportion of all queries, not a higher absolute query count. So a tiny country where 80% of the queries are for “bananas” will get twice the score of a giant country where only 40% of the queries are for “bananas”.] Got it? Sure.
The fact that 2024 was an Olympic year is pretty clearly represented in the data: globally, searches for cycling peaked in the week of 4-10 August, the pinnacle of a noticeable rise from the end of June onwards (that’s the Tour de France effect). There are also little bobbles around the classics and the conclusion of the Giro d’Italia.
Some fun surprises
Drilling into things on a country-by-country basis yields some pretty interesting nuggets, which I’m just going to cherrypick here as they amuse me:
- ‘What is cycling’ – just an amazing thing to be the #2 most searched cycling thing in the USA
- ‘Matt Richardson’ and ‘Matthew Richardson cycling’ – top ‘rising’ search (and also #4) in the UK of the year, which I guess means that they had lots of questions about the track cyclist that they’d just poached from Australia (who were also somewhat invested in the same drama, although a little less – #21 and #24)
- Italy’s national pride in its home Grand Tour is reflected in the fact that late-May is the zenith of its cycling searches. They’re also a stat-heavy bunch over there, apparently – four of the top five queries for the entire year are variations of ‘cycling stats’, ‘pro cycling stats’, ‘pcs’ and ‘pcs cycling’.
- In France, search volumes peaked for the Olympics rather than the Tour. The French are slightly less keen on stats than their neighbours, although it’s still up there (four out of the top 10). Also of note: a lot of searches for Tudor Pro Cycling from all the Alaphilippe fans wondering just what he’s got himself into for next year. Bad news, Total Energies – you’re nowhere to be found.
If you delve into even narrower search terms (‘pro cycling’ instead of ‘cycling’, for example) there are other treasures to be found. Variants of search terms relating to both the Tudor and Q36.5 teams make up #8-12 globally – stunningly, ahead of the Tour de France. Folks need their updates on where their charismatic bike men are going! And if you switch it to ‘road cycling’ from ‘pro cycling’, the effect of the Olympics makes its presence felt: six out of the top 10 searches globally.
If you look toward bike tech – the machines rather than the act of racing them – Trek, Specialized and Giant, in that order, are the brands represented in the top 25 global search terms for ‘mountain bike’ (the rest are more generic variations of ‘best mountain bikes’, ‘electric bike’, etc).
On the road side that pattern is repeated, leaving little doubt about who the top three most recognisable brands in the market are globally. That checks out with Strava’s recent Year in Sport data, which listed the three brands as its most used gear during cycling activities logged on the platform.
No bike brands are represented in the top 25 under Google Shopping, with more people searching for broad categories of products than going straight for the jugular.
Hey, Google …
Seen cynically, all of this search data – these millions of cycling-related searches from millions of curious people – is a bit terrifying. Tech giants like Google are vast corporations amassing vast wealth from selling information about all the people with a touchpoint with their services – which is pretty much everyone with access to the internet. That doesn’t feel great if you think about it for too long, or even if you don’t.
But it’s not all downside, I suppose. Google Search sends people off on all sorts of weird journeys around the internet, but it also yields a fascinating picture of the world’s relationship with bikes, the people that ride them, and the races they compete in. There’s reassurance in that – to learn that there are loads of people out there who either love bikes just like you, or are on the cusp of realising it.
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