Google Search interest for WWE as a brand (so including related terms and not just ‘WWE’ as a singular search term) is up 10% over the last year globally, and up 10% in the US. However, this growth could mainly be attributed to the biggest spike of the last 12 months coming in December 2025, so not the Royal Rumble, not WrestleMania…but the end of John Cena’s in-ring career.

It’s sometimes easy to forget just how big of a star John Cena was/is, but you just need to look at the graph below to see how much interest his retirement brought to the company in the tail-end of 2025. But the drop since then (and what I’m expecting to come) certainly does give you pause for thought.

Google Trends scores measure relative search (interest rather than the total number of searches) and the highest point in the selected location and period is assigned a score of 100. It’s not an exact science of knowing how much hype is around a certain event/weekly show, but it’s a good indicator.

Where the WWE interest is coming from

Below is a breakdown from Google Trends of where boost in search interest is coming from. Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Zambia come out as the top 3 followed by the US and then the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the search interest from Zimbabwe actually peaks around April of this year (so WrestleMania season), whilst the UK has spikes around the end of December 2025/January 2026 and the US trendline mirrors the above Worldwide data quite closely.

WrestleMania is still a household name and the global juggernaut when it comes to branding for WWE, so its not surprising that countries outside of the US and the UK could still be spiking around then (again I tested just Zimbabwe for reference, so this isn’t exhaustive), but the ‘Worldwide’ level is clearly bolstered by the December 2025 interest in Cena.

WWE will have absolutely nothing like that to lean on in December this year, so while the growth of 10% is a net positive (and they’re still well above AEW in terms of global interest), I feel like it is being masked by the spike in December 2025 by a moment in time that they can’t replicate for at least a few more years, when the likes of CM Punk decide to hang up the boots.

WWE over the past 5 years

Right now, Google Search interest in the company is sitting well above where it was in 2022, but it is someway behind where it was in the heights of 2023 (around WrestleMania 39). The trendline has been lifting since then, yes, but again this is all from a year that featured John Cena’s retirement tour, so they need to try and find that interest again from somewhere else.

You can ask “why does any of this even matter?” Well, advertisers are consistently looking at where they can get more brand penetration for their products and how they can reach audiences; seeing what the level of interest is, from the biggest search engine in the world, is one of the ways in which they do that.