India’s future is not linear. It is a mosaic of shifting behaviors, emotional tensions and emerging desires. The brands that win will be the ones that read these micro signals early and act with cultural intelligence.
Search is no longer just a reflection of what India is doing today. It is a preview of what India will want next. When viewed across millions of queries, three distinct speeds of cultural change become visible. Some ideas appear as fads that rise fast and fade fast. Some mature into trends that quietly settle into daily life. And some evolve into megatrends that return in new forms across decades, reshaping categories and cultural expectations.
Fads are the quickest and most dramatic. They shoot up in search volume, burn bright, and then disappear just as rapidly. Bubble tea, once a viral obsession, now shows a decline at -18% YoY in 2025. So has the wellness craze around Ghee coffee, -64% YoY. These sharp movements reflect curiosity rather than commitment. India experiments, imitates, samples and moves on. Fads tell us what captures attention, but rarely what becomes meaningful behaviour.
Trends behave very differently. They grow slowly and steadily because they integrate into routines rather than disrupt them. India’s shift toward protein-forward eating is one of the clearest examples. Searches for plant protein have grown by 38%. Vegan Omega 3 supplements are up by 117%. Gut health queries now cross 2.3MN searches every month and continue to grow at 8%. These behaviours are not driven by hype. They express a long-term desire for metabolic clarity, strength and day-to-day wellbeing.
Traditional foods are also being quietly upgraded: Cold pressed oils, +12.6% from last year, strained yogurt, +13%, and Avocado, once unfamiliar to most households, now receives 2.1MN avg. searches a month with +3% YoY growth. These shifts succeed because they make existing routines feel fresher, lighter and more beneficial without demanding lifestyle overhaul. Trends become habits because they answer enduring needs such as digestion, strength, comfort, experience and ease.
Beyond both fads and trends sit the megatrends. These are slow, powerful cultural currents that deepen, contract and resurface across long arcs of time. India’s megatrend in the early 2010s was purity and natural living. In the mid-2020s it shifted toward resilience through immunity, evidence-led beauty and functional nutrition. Today, the next megatrend taking shape is metabolic wellbeing. Fiber-related searches have surged by 54%. Interest in digestive enzymes continues to rise. Probiotics have travelled from niche interest to mainstream adoption. This is not simply a global echo. It reflects a core Indian belief that long-term wellness begins in the gut, now strengthened by modern scientific vocabulary and the pressures of contemporary life.
Megatrends endure because they speak to emotional truths that do not disappear. Energy, stress, control, vitality, ageing and aspiration are ongoing concerns. As megatrends gain strength, they reshape multiple categories at once. Everyday health foods are highly searched, showing that health-driven choices are no longer occasional. Convenience has also expanded into a megatrend as ease has become a cultural value. In modern India, time has become as precious as money, and consumers are using digital ecosystems to reclaim it.
This layered structure of fads, trends and megatrends matters. When brands treat fads as trends, they chase noise. When they treat trends as megatrends, they may over-invest in behaviours that soften over time. But when brands decode these layers correctly and understand the cultural architecture beneath behavior, they gain disproportionate advantage in a marketplace where Meaningful Difference is increasingly hard to sustain.
India now operates in a flywheel environment where search influences retail, retail influences content, content influences search, and all of it shapes AI-driven recommendation systems. Every query becomes training data. Every behavioural pattern either accelerates or reduces a brand’s discoverability. Understanding how India experiments, adopts, abandons and stabilizes ideas is now central to becoming predicted, preferred and primed long before the consumer reaches the shelf.
This is where Kantar’s expertise becomes essential. Using the Kantar Trends Framework, millions of search signals obtained via our TrendEvaluate solution, are mapped against cultural trajectories, behavioral data and category patterns to determine which shifts are fads, which are stable trends and which have the depth and velocity to become megatrends. This classification helps brands focus their investments, innovate with confidence and act with cultural intelligence rather than instinct.
India’s future will not unfold in straight lines. It will be shaped by micro shifts and mega currents, by small queries and large emotional arcs. Fads flare. Trends settle. Megatrends endure and reshape everything they touch. Search shows all three in motion. For brands willing to read these signals early, India’s infinite search data offers not chaos, but clarity.
The figures above are sourced from our India in Search study, where representative Google Topics across 11 categories are analyzed through TrendEvaluate for the period January to December 2025, using average monthly search volumes and YoY growth from 2024 to 2025
For more information, contact ranjana.gupta@kantar.com or sherinlindahephzibah.d@kantar.com
Authors: Ranjana Gupta, Director, Kantar and Sherin Linda Hephzibah D, Account Director – Innovation, India, Kantar
