We mapped every Google search for every Pokémon ever made. This is what the internet remembers.
If you ranked all 1025 Pokémon by their average Google search interest over the last twenty years, the number one spot wouldn't surprise you.
Pikachu's average normalized score is 73. The runner-up — Eevee — sits at 29. Charizard, arguably the second most iconic Pokémon ever created, reaches 20. MewTwo and Ditto round out the top 5. (This site was created just as Pokopia was coming out however and Ditto may be higher now).
Below the top five, the drop becomes a cliff. By rank 25, scores are already in single digits. The search for Pokémon is, in practice, a search for a handful of faces most people already know by heart.
On July 6, 2016, Pokémon GO launched and popularity in Pokemon has never been higher since then. In the month after Go launched, total search interest for Pokémon exploded to nearly five times its normal level.
People who hadn't thought about Pokémon in a decade were suddenly hunting them in parks, at bus stops, in offices. The spike was so dramatic it looks like a data error. It isn't.
The franchise has had other peaks — the launch of X&Y in 2013, Scarlet & Violet in 2022.
Then, starting in 2024, something quieter but just as sustained began. Search interest climbed steadily and held — driven not by a game launch but by the Trading Card Game's resurgence. Booster pack openings, graded card speculation, and influencer pull videos turned the TCG into a cultural moment of its own. Pikachu cards were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pokémon releases a new generation roughly every three years. Each arrives to enormous excitement, with new creatures, new regions, new stories. And then, reliably, the internet drifts back to the beginning.
Generation I Pokémon average 2.56 normalized interest — more than double any other generation. Generation IX, the newest, averages just 0.06. Not because the new Pokémon are bad. But because familiarity compounds over decades, and Bulbasaur has had a thirty-year head start.
The franchise has 1025 Pokémon. But on any given month, the vast majority of them barely register a search. Not because they aren't good — many are fan favorites with deep competitive histories. But cultural visibility doesn't spread evenly.
807 out of 1009 Pokémon — exactly 80% — have an average normalized interest below 1 out of 100. Meanwhile, the top 10 Pokémon capture 21.8% of all search interest the franchise generates. Fame is radically, almost brutally, concentrated.
The chart below is not a normal distribution. It is a power law — the same curve that governs celebrity, wealth, and virality. In Pokémon, as in much of culture, most of the attention flows to a very few.
Group Pokémon by their primary type and a clear pattern emerges. Electric-types average nearly twice the interest of most other types. This is the Pikachu effect — the world's most searched Pokémon pulls its entire category upward simply by existing.
Fire and Dragon types follow closely, powered by fan favorites like Charizard, Arcanine, Dragonite, and Garchomp. At the other end, Bug and Flying types sit at the bottom.
The ranking also reflects a preference for certain designs. Iconic Pokémon tend to be visually dramatic, in the competitive meta, chase cards or narratively central to the games. We found these Pokemon tend to cluster around a handful of types, particuarly Dragon.
Every generation builds its mythology around rare, powerful Pokémon that drive the story forward. 94 legendaries and mythicals have been released across nine generations. Each one is designed to feel singular and unforgettable.
But search interest reveals a strict hierarchy. Mewtwo leads the field with an average score of 14.72 — nearly double Arceus at 7.87. The original villain of the franchise has never been displaced, despite every generation's attempt to create something more powerful or more dramatic. Nostalgia, again, proves unbeatable.
Whenever a new gen is released, there is always a pre-release debate about which starter will be the best a.k.a the fan favorite. Some people may be type maximalists, choosing the same type in every gen. The data finds however that the favorite of each generation is not always the same type. In fact, each type (fire, water and grass) have seemed to have successive dynasties. Fire types dominated in the beginning but then the water type became most popular starting with gen 3. However since gen 7, grass types have been the most popular.
Fire starters — the archetype most associated with power and popularity — only win 2 out of 9 generations. Water wins 4. Grass wins 3. Meanwhile, Gen I's Charmander stands completely alone: its average score is roughly 10× any other individual starter, a gap no subsequent generation has come close to closing.
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