Who is winning attention
Search interest is the closest public proxy for which VPN brands are growing. It is worth watching, and it is worth being honest about: this chart mostly measures marketing. It sits next to the maintenance index so you can see where the two disagree — a brand climbing here while flatlining there is the interesting case.
Who people are searching for
Relative Google search interest in the United States over the past year, weekly. This measures attention, not maintenance — a brand rises here by advertising, not by shipping software. It is shown beside the index and is never part of it.
Every brand, ranked by 12-month change
Change compares the first three months of the window with the last three.
| VPN | Past 12 months | Change | Avg interest | Index rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Surfshark | +216% | 23.3 | 1 | |
| NordVPN | +57% | 30.7 | 2 | |
| Windscribe | +39% | 4.3 | 4 | |
| Mullvad | +38% | 7.5 | 6 | |
| Proton VPN | +14% | 17.0 | 5 | |
| Private Internet Access | +12% | 3.3 | 16 | |
| Norton VPN | +11% | 2.4 | 7 | |
| ExpressVPN | +4% | 7.2 | 3 | |
| IPVanish | +0% | 2.4 | 15 |
Too small to trend reliably
Google Trends reports interest relative to the largest brand in each comparison, so these sit at or near the floor against our anchor. We do not quote a percentage change for them: on a base this small, a couple of extra searches reads as triple-digit "growth". Small search volume is not zero search volume, and says nothing about product quality.
CyberGhost, TunnelBear, Hotspot Shield, Bitdefender VPN, Astrill, AirVPN, IVPN, Kaspersky VPN, PureVPN, hide.me, OVPN, FastestVPN, HMA VPN, Ivacy, Perfect Privacy, PrivateVPN, StrongVPN, TorGuard, Trust.Zone, VyprVPN, ZoogVPN.
Source: Google Trends, US, past 12-m. Compared in batches of five against a shared anchor brand (NordVPN) and rescaled onto one axis — the standard method, and the reason very small brands cannot be resolved. Collected Sep 7, 2026.