This Was the Top Trending Cocktail on Google in 2023

If you were typing “naked and famous” into Google in 2023, you might have had a less prurient reason to do so. According to Google’s Year in Search, the Naked and Famous cocktail was a top-trending search term during the past year.

Google released its annual Year in Search on Monday. The data reflects the top trending searches, which means the “trending” queries with the searches that had a high spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2023 as compared to 2022, as opposed to simply the most-searched terms. The data included is for the U.S. only.

While it’s not available on the trends landing page, the top trending searches for cocktails in 2023 were as follows:

Naked and Famous
Azalea
Brown Derby
Revolver
Gimlet
El Presidente
Bee’s Knees
White Lady
Last Word
Sex on the Beach

That’s quite a list! Most of these are early 20th-century classics undergoing a renaissance, although Sex on the Beach is from the 1980s (and hardly classic) while the Revolver dates to the early 2000s.

Let’s examine the top two trending searches, however. The Azalea is the unofficial cocktail of the Masters golf tournament, a vodka or gin concoction with pineapple juice and Grenadine that’s meant to evoke the shade of pink in Azalea bush on the grounds of Augusta.

The Key to Great Mezcal Cocktails? Pretending It’s Gin.

Most compare the spirit to tequila, but it works better when treated like a different spirit

As for the Naked and Famous? It’s one of those rare, modern cocktails made with Mezcal. Per Imbibe’s history of the drink, it was initially created at NYC’s cocktail haven Death & Co. by Joaquín Simó, who called the cocktail “the bastard love child of a classic Last Word and the Paper Plane, conceived in the mountains of Oaxaca” (he also said it was “easily his sluttiest drink.” It’s also apparently named after a lyric by Tricky.) It’s also the rare equal-parts cocktail, containing similar pours of Mezcal, Yellow Chartreuse, Aperol and fresh lime juice (shake with ice, strain into a coupe) — here’s a recipe utilizing Del Maguey mezcal.

So why was it trending? It seemed to be a particularly popular search in the D.C. area, and given that Death & Co. recently opened a branch there, that’s a possible reason. It’s also a fun name and mezcal is on the rise — and, simply put, it’s a great cocktail. Those are good enough reasons to trend in any year.