Every search typed into Google is a small confession. Nobody asks “is THC a felony in Texas” for fun, and nobody types “cbd dog treats near me” unless there is a dog and a problem. Put a few million of these confessions together and you get something closer to a mood ring for a whole country than any survey can offer. That is what this analysis does for the United States in the third quarter of 2026.
The numbers come from Google Trends, collected on 25 September 2026, and cover five search terms (cannabis, marijuana, weed, CBD and THC) over twelve months, plus the broader “Cannabis — Drug” topic over five years. One caveat before anything else: the last week in the data, starting 20 September, is flagged by Google as incomplete, so the September figures may still move slightly.
Key Takeaways
Interest in every one of the five cannabis-related search terms fell in the United States between the second and third quarters of 2026, with CBD dropping the most (−32.7%) and THC barely moving (−4.4%). The decline is largely a calendar effect: April, and 4/20 in particular, is the annual peak for cannabis searches, and it sits inside the second quarter. The one genuine story of the summer was Texas, where a state crackdown on hemp-derived THC products sent queries like “new texas thc laws” up by more than 1,000%. Americans who search for THC increasingly want gummies and drinks, while CBD searches are shrinking and drifting toward pet products. On the five-year view, the September 2026 reading is slightly above September 2025, the first year-on-year uptick after four years of decline.
What cannabis search trends actually measure
Google Trends does not count searches. It shows relative popularity on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is the busiest moment for that term in the chosen place and period. According to Google’s own FAQ, each data point is divided by the total number of searches in that region and time window, then rescaled. A score of 50 means half the interest of the peak, not half the searches of some other term.
Two consequences matter for reading this article. First, the numbers are only comparable inside a single chart. The “weed” score of 68 and the “cannabis” score of 21 sit on the same scale because they were pulled together, but you cannot line them up against a figure from a different query. Second, Trends works from a sample of searches, so a second pull on another day could shift the figures by a point or two. We treat differences of a few percent as noise, not news.
For the five individual words we used search terms, not Google’s “topics”, because Google folds cannabis, marijuana and weed into one topic and the comparison would collapse into a single line. For the cross-country and five-year views we used the topic itself, which Google labels “Cannabis — Drug”.
The quarter in numbers: everything went down
Averaged over twelve months, “weed” is the runaway leader in American search with a score of 68. “Cannabis” and “THC” tie at 21, “marijuana” sits at 17 and “CBD” trails at 11. That ranking has not changed for years: Americans say weed the way Germans say Cannabis and Russians say марихуана.
The quarter-on-quarter comparison is where it gets interesting. We averaged the twelve weekly readings from 5 July to 20 September (Q3) and compared them with the thirteen weeks from 5 April to 28 June (Q2). Every term fell. “Cannabis” dropped from 26.23 to 19.42, a fall of 26.0%. “Marijuana” went from 19.15 to 16.67 (−13.0%). “Weed” slipped from 86.54 to 74.33 (−14.1%). “CBD” fell hardest, from 14.00 to 9.42 (−32.7%). “THC” was the most stable, easing from 23.54 to 22.50 (−4.4%).
The broader topic tells the same story with less drama: a Q3 average of 75.00 against 79.85 in Q2, down 6.1%. No week in the past twelve months qualified as a spike by our threshold of 1.5 times the average. The highest point of the year was the week of 19 April 2026, which scored 100 on the US-only scale.
Before anyone reads this as America losing interest in cannabis, look at the calendar.
The 4/20 effect explains most of the decline
Pull the “Cannabis — Drug” topic out to five years and a rhythm appears. The busiest month every single year is April: the monthly average was 83.8 in 2022, 72.4 in 2023, 67.8 in 2024, 62.5 in 2025 and 70.0 in 2026. The all-time peak of the five-year window is the week of 17 April 2022, and the week of 19 April 2026 is tied for second place with a score of 86. Whatever else is happening in policy or culture, 4/20 is the Super Bowl of cannabis search.
Because April belongs to the second quarter, any Q3-versus-Q2 comparison starts with a built-in handicap. September is lower than April every year, and the question worth asking is not “did Q3 fall?” but “how does this September compare with previous Septembers?”
Here the news is mildly positive. September averages had declined steadily from 70.0 in 2021 to 66.0, 63.5, 57.2 and 56.0 in 2025. September 2026 came in at 59.7, which is 3.7 points above the year before. It is the first September in the series to rise year on year. Three weeks of data, one of them incomplete, is a thin basis for calling a turnaround, but the direction is at least no longer down.
Texas wrote the rising-query lists this summer
If the interest-over-time charts are the tide, the “rising” lists are the waves. These are queries whose popularity grew fastest between 25 June and 25 September 2026, and in the United States one state dominated all of them.
Under “THC”, the top rising query was “new texas thc laws” (+1,600%), followed by “new thc laws in texas” (+1,550%), “new thc law in texas” (+1,150%) and “new texas thc laws 2026” (+1,050%). “Is thc a felony in texas” rose 450% and “texas bans thc” rose 400%. Under “weed”, “texas new weed laws” led with +3,100% and four of the next five entries were variations on the same theme. Under “marijuana”, “new texas marijuana laws” grew 800%. Even the CBD list caught the wave: “is cbd illegal in texas” rose 180% and “is cbd legal in texas” rose 90%.
The trigger is not hard to find. After a Texas Supreme Court ruling in May 2026 dissolved an injunction that had been in place since 2021, the state’s health department reinstated its Schedule I definitions for tetrahydrocannabinols, and from 31 July 2026 delta-8, delta-10 and related manufactured cannabinoids were treated as controlled substances in the state. Earlier, on 31 March, a “total THC” rule had already made most smokable high-THCA hemp flower non-compliant. Hemp-derived delta-9 edibles and beverages under 0.3% THC remained legal, which is exactly why so many people were googling to find out where the line now runs.
The Texas story also has a federal echo. The 2025 appropriations law that narrowed the federal definition of hemp was due to bite on 12 November 2026; a stopgap funding bill signed on 2 September pushed that date to 11 December for naturally occurring cannabinoids, while synthetic ones stay on the original timeline. We covered the business side of that looming deadline when Cheech and Chong opened a hemp dispensary in Maine weeks before Washington moved to ban their bestseller. For search behaviour, the practical effect is a public that is confused about what is legal, and confusion is the single most reliable driver of Google queries.
THC: gummies, drinks and drug tests
Strip out Texas and the THC lists show what Americans actually want from the molecule. The top related query is “gummies thc” (score 100), then “thc drinks” (91), “thc test” (90), “what is thc” (90) and “thc drink” (86). “Thc near me” scores 74, “thc vape” 71 and “thc drug test” 45. In the rising list, apart from the Texas cluster, a beverage brand query, “high rider thc drink”, grew 550%.
That is a snapshot of a product category that has moved from dispensary shelves to grocery coolers. Hemp-derived THC beverages have been the fastest-growing corner of the American market for two years, a trend we tracked when one drinks brand reported a 270% sales surge even as the federal ban loomed. The search data confirms the demand is real: two of the five most popular THC-related queries are about drinks.
The prominence of “thc test” and “thc drug test” is the flip side. In a country where employment screening for cannabis is still routine in many industries, a large share of THC searches is not about getting high but about not getting caught. The single fastest-rising “marijuana” query of the quarter, up 1,900%, was “how long does marijuana stay in your system for a mouth swab”.
CBD: shrinking, and increasingly for dogs
CBD was the term that fell furthest in Q3 (−32.7%), and it was already the smallest of the five on the twelve-month average. The related queries suggest why. The top two are “thc” and “cbd thc”, both at 100, which means a large share of people who type CBD are really trying to work out how it differs from THC. “Cbd oil” scores 80, “gummies” 78 and “cbd gummies” 76.
Then come the dogs. “Cbd dogs” scores 35, “dog cbd” 29 and “cbd for dogs” 27, and in the rising list “cbd dog treats near me” doubled. Pet products are now a structural part of American CBD demand, which fits what we found when we looked at why people use CBD across six countries: the human market has matured, the marketing hype has cooled, and the growth is at the margins. The top rising CBD query, a brand of gummies at +4,000%, is the kind of spike a single advertising campaign or a viral post can produce and says little about the category.
Cannabis versus marijuana: two words, two audiences
“Cannabis” and “marijuana” look like synonyms but their search neighbourhoods are different. People who type “cannabis” are shopping: the top related queries are “dispensary” (100), “cannabis dispensary” (99), “cannabis near me” (82), “cannabis store” (30) and “dispensary near me” (27). Only “what is cannabis” (48) and “medical cannabis” (39) break the retail pattern.
People who type “marijuana” are dealing with the system. “Medical marijuana” is the top query at 100, followed by “what is marijuana” (44), “marijuana near me” (43), “is marijuana legal” (40), “marijuana card” (40) and “medical marijuana card” (32). “Marijuana test” (24) rounds out the picture. The older word is the one that appears in state statutes and on medical forms, and the search behaviour follows the paperwork. It echoes the split between medical and recreational motives we reported in a US study on why Americans use cannabis.
Where the interest is: Nevada, Wyoming, Vermont
Ranked by the “Cannabis — Drug” topic over twelve months, the states with the most cannabis-heavy search behaviour are Nevada (100), Wyoming (91), Vermont (89), Maine (86), New Mexico (84), Montana (83), Oklahoma (79), Missouri (77), West Virginia (74) and Michigan (73).
This list surprises people until they remember the normalisation. Trends divides cannabis searches by all searches in each state, so a state with a small population and a legal market, or a state where the topic is politically live, ranks above California or New York even though those states generate far more raw queries. Nevada’s dispensary tourism and Oklahoma’s unusually open medical programme both fit that reading. Wyoming, which has no legal market, is harder to explain from the data alone, and we do not try.
The word “weed” has a gardening problem
One reason “weed” dominates the charts deserves a warning label. Its top related query is “weed eater” (100), and “weed killer” (71) and “weed wacker” (33) are also in the top ten. “Spurge weed killer” and “spurge weed” appeared in the rising list at +250%. Summer is lawn season, and a meaningful share of the “weed” line is people fighting dandelions, not looking for dispensaries. The cannabis-specific entries, “weed near me” (53), “dispensary” (49), “weed dispensary” (48), “weed pen” (26) and “delivery weed” (24), are the ones to watch. Any commentator quoting “weed” as a pure cannabis metric is overstating the case.
Limitations, stated plainly
This is search data, not consumption data. A fall in searches for “cannabis” does not mean fewer Americans used it; it may mean they already know where the shop is. We compared a twelve-week quarter with a thirteen-week one, and the second quarter contains 4/20. The final week is incomplete. Trends is sampled, so figures can wobble on re-collection. Rising lists mix the meaningful with the random: “francie frane net worth” and “formula1news” both appeared under “cannabis” this quarter for reasons we cannot reconstruct. Related-query lists are capped at 25 entries and show relative scores, not counts. And the same comparison for Germany and Russia, which we have run separately, shows the United States scoring 74 on the shared topic scale against 32 for Germany and 5 for Russia, a reminder that what counts as a large move in one country would not register in another.
FAQ
It marks the single busiest point for that term within the chosen place and time period. Every other value is a fraction of that peak. It is not a count of searches, and a 100 in the United States is not the same amount of searching as a 100 in Germany.
Partly because CBD was already the smallest of the five, so a modest absolute change shows up as a large percentage. Partly because the American CBD market has matured: the related queries show people comparing CBD with THC, buying gummies and oil, and shopping for their dogs, none of which drives the kind of curiosity searches that made CBD spike in 2019 and 2020.
It depends on the state and, soon, on the federal calendar. Products under 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight are still sold under the 2018 hemp definition in many states, but Texas has treated delta-8 and other manufactured cannabinoids as controlled substances since 31 July 2026, and several other states restrict THCA flower. At the federal level, a narrower definition of hemp is scheduled to take effect on 11 December 2026 for naturally occurring cannabinoids and 12 November for synthetic ones, unless Congress changes course again. Anyone relying on the legality of a specific product should check the current rules in their own state.
No. Search interest measures curiosity and intent to find information, not behaviour. Established consumers search less because they need less information. The year-on-year September comparison, which strips out the 4/20 seasonality, is a better guide to underlying interest than any quarter-on-quarter figure.
Legal disclaimer
This article is a journalistic analysis of publicly available search data and is provided for general information only. It is not legal advice, medical advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, possess or use any cannabis or hemp product. Cannabis laws in the United States differ between federal and state levels and change frequently; the descriptions of Texas and federal rules above reflect the position as reported in September 2026 and may no longer be current when you read this. Google Trends figures are relative, sampled and subject to revision. Readers with questions about the legality of a product or activity in their jurisdiction should consult a qualified attorney.
