4 GIPHY Search Trends to Pay Attention to This Valentine’s Day

GIPHY
GIPHY
Published in
4 min readFeb 13, 2025

Got plans with your sneaky link this Valentine’s Day? According to our search data, you may not be alone.

In anticipation of Valentine’s Day this year, we took a look at search data from 2024 to understand how GIPHY users feel about their relationships and relationship status year-round. We went under the hood with a few key questions: when exactly is cuffing season? When do our users feel single the most? When are our users soft launching their relationships? The answers we found among billions of searches may surprise you, whether you’re cuffed up, in a situationship or flying solo this V-Day.

Below, you’ll find four takeaways from the data, including a breakdown of the broader cultural trends propelling user search behavior. Here’s a look at modern romance, as told by GIPHY.

Actually, cuffing season is August–October

While some (*cough cough* Merriam-Webster) may define cuffing season as something that “begins in October and lasts until just after Valentines Day,” our data tells us a different story — it actually kicks off at the end of summer and peaks in the fall.

According to search data from 2024, queries for “cuffing season” first begin to climb in August, spiking by 101.4 percent compared to July. Searches for the term continue to climb before peaking in October with a 22.5 percent increase from the previous month. After October, interest declines sharply with the downward trend continuing into the new year, reaching a low in June–July.

What does this all mean? TL;DR: cuffing season is from August to October. Sorry, Merriam-Webster.

February is for the lonely hearts

February can be a lonely month for our users, with searches for “single” and “forever alone” reaching all-time highs during this time.

The data speaks for itself: A month-by-month analysis shows that searches for “single” increase by 12.4 percent in February compared to January, while searches for “forever alone” jump by 35.3 percent — suggesting that our single users are acutely feeling their relationship status during the year’s most romantic holiday. Searches for both terms drop sharply in March and remain steady until June–July, when they see modest jumps in searches before dropping again.

February is also for the sneaky links and situationships

Valentine’s Day isn’t just for couples — it’s also for those ambiguous situationships.

According to our data from 2024, searches for both “situationship” (a 2023 Oxford Word of the Year runner-up) and “sneaky link” surged in February, with queries for the latter peaking that month compared to the rest of the year. A closer look at the data reveals that searches for “sneaky link” jumped 131.7 percent in February compared to January, while searches for “situationship” jumped 42.6 percent over the same time period. Beyond February, engagement with both terms also increased at the start of summer (May–June), with “situationship” searches peaking in May.

A year-over-year analysis also showed an increase in searches for both terms compared to 2023, with “sneaky link” growing by 131.6 percent year-over-year. This could be a reflection of a larger shift happening in the culture: a 2024 YouGov poll found that 50% of U.S. adults aged 18–34 reported having been in a situationship in the past.

Soft launching is for February and June; hard launching is for October–November

Is soft launching for situationships and hard launching for cuffing season? According to our data, it sure seems that way.

The biggest spikes in searches for “soft launch” occurred in February (24.03 percent) and April (20.81 percent), with June marking the peak for the term. Meanwhile, searches for “hard launch” jumped in February and April and remained at a steady level before peaking in October with a 60.86 percent increase in queries from its lowest point in January.

Notably, search trends for “soft launch” and “hard launch” aligned with trends for two other terms in this report — “situationship” and “cuffing season” — indicating that the two trends are intertwined.

Interested in hopping on some of these trends before they happen with GIPHY? Check out ads.giphy.com.

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Written by GIPHY

GIPHY is all the GIFs. We’re the first and largest GIF search engine where artists, brands, and users alike go to make everyday conversation more entertaining.

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