How long do TikTok trends last? We tracked 23 AI trends

How long do trends last on TikTok?

Add the medians up and a typical AI trend runs about three weeks from its first AI post until search is at a tenth of its peak, with the biggest share of it packed into a single week. These are the medians from our 23 trends (Google search, worldwide, read 15 Oct 2026):

• 5 days from the first AI post to the search peak (the 11 trends with a dated first AI post)
• 4 days from the peak until search drops below half (18 trends)
• 8 days to a quarter of the peak and 15 days to a tenth (16 and 15 trends)
• A median 43% of a trend's search over four months falls in the 7 days around its peak (15 trends)
• About 1.5% of peak search is left a year later (14 trends)
• The biggest, Ghibli AI: posts began on 25 Mar 2025, search peaked on 30 Mar, was at a tenth by 6 Apr and has stayed at 0–1% of that peak since May 2025

23 AI trends, from first post to fade

Newest first. Each row is Google search for the trend's own name, worldwide, read on 15 Oct 2026. Half and a tenth count the days from the peak until search stayed below 50% or 10% of it for three days running. The trends you can make here link to their page.

First AI post is the earliest dated AI post we could source. Where we couldn't source one, the cell says when search took off instead (the first day at 10% of the peak). The 2026 rows were still moving when we read them, so treat them as a snapshot from 14 Oct 2026, the last full day of data.

Photo prompts are bigger, video trends last longer

The 9 photo-prompt trends in the table halved a median of 3 days after their peak and reached a tenth after 10. The 8 video trends that have halved took a median of 7 days, and the 5 that have reached a tenth took 28. Of our 2026 video remakes, Hotel Lobby halved in 3 days, as fast as a photo prompt, and Rumpelstiltskin and Raindance in 7. Bulin 47, Burning Bridges and Alors on Danse hadn't halved 4 to 7 days after their peaks.

Size runs the other way. On a scale where Ghibli AI's peak is 100, the photo trends peaked at a median of about 5 (the AI yearbook 15, the Gemini saree 14, the AI action figure 6) and the video trends at about 0.5. 'hotel lobby ai' and 'bulin 47', the biggest of our 2026 remakes on that scale, reached about 2. These are rough ratios chained across several Google Trends comparisons, not search counts.

Our read of why: a photo prompt takes a minute to copy, so everyone does it in the same few days and moves on. The AI yearbook made Epik the top trending free app on the App Store (CNBC, 5 Oct 2023); search peaked two days later and halved three days after that. A video remake needs a clip, a photo and a wait, so new versions keep arriving for longer. That's the only kind we make here: video remakes, not photo prompts.

Where the live remakes are on the curve

Search readings from 14 Oct 2026, plays from 15 Oct. Each trend page shows the latest stage and the date we read it.

1. Bulin 47↗ Rising ≈380M views · 1 person · 15s Search peaked on 10 Oct 2026, four days after the first AI swap, and was still at 65% on 14 Oct. Just you, in the middle of the crowd filming on their phones. See yourself in it
2. Alors on Danse↗ Rising ≈14M views · 2 people · 18s First AI version on 3 Oct 2026, search peak on 7 Oct, and at 41% on 14 Oct after dipping and climbing back. The top remakes were still gaining plays on 15 Oct. You and a friend: one plays, one dances. See yourself in it
3. Rumpelstiltskin Dance↗ Rising ≈57M views · 1–2 people · 9s Search halved on 12 Oct 2026, a week after its peak, but the top remakes were still adding plays on 15 Oct (the Bonnie and Clyde version went from 5.1M to 5.3M in a day). Solo as the imp, or bring a friend as the maiden. See yourself in it
4. Raindance ≈200M views · 2 people · 28s The earliest AI remake we found went up on 27 Sep 2026. The biggest went up on 2 Oct, the day before search peaked, and had 50.3M plays when we read it on 15 Oct. A two-person clip: you and your person on the pier. See yourself in it

Pet trends: tens of millions of views, almost no searches

Smalltown Boy Cats and the I Wanna Love You cat have about 46M and 45M views by our estimates (read 15 Oct 2026). Yet on Google, between 1 Aug and 14 Oct 2026, 'smalltown boy cats' peaked at 3% and 'i wanna love you cat' at 5% of 'raindance ai', which itself peaks at about 8% of 'hotel lobby ai'. That's roughly 0.2 to 0.4% of Hotel Lobby's search peak. Searches for the song 'I Wanna Love You' stayed flat throughout.

People find pet trends in the feed and copy them from there, so search can't time them. The better signal is whether new pet versions keep going up, and on 15 Oct 2026 both clips were still getting new ones. Smalltown Boy Cats is one you can make now with your own two cats, and AI pet trends has the pet clips we track.

A new AI tool sets off a wave of trends

OpenAI launched a new image generator in ChatGPT on 25 Mar 2025. Ghibli-style posts took off the same day (Know Your Meme), and search peaked 5 days later, on 30 Mar. The AI action figure came next and peaked on 11 Apr, 17 days after the launch; on 9 Apr ChatGPT hit an all-time high of 184.4 million visits (Similarweb data, via Yahoo News).

Google released a new image model on 26 Aug 2025. By 4 Sep, Google said more than 200 million images had been edited with it (9to5Google). Four photo trends made with it followed: the 3D figurine peaked 16 days after the launch, the polaroid hug with your younger self 18, the saree 19 and the Halloween mask photo 33.

Video tools do the same. Google's video model launched on 20 May 2025, a Bigfoot AI vlog went up on TikTok on 25 May, and search for the Bigfoot vlogs peaked on 14 Jun, 25 days after the launch. So a big model launch is an early warning: the first trend can arrive within days, and new ones keep coming for about a month.

Named trends don't come back

A year after the peak, the median trend in our set was at about 1.5% of its peak search (the 14 trends with a full year of data). Ghibli AI has been at 0–1% since May 2025 and the AI yearbook at 0–3% since Nov 2023. Last year's Halloween mask photo trend peaked in the week of 28 Sep 2025 and was at 2% of that in the weeks of 4 and 11 Oct 2026: no Halloween comeback so far.

The two highest readings a year on aren't comebacks either. The AI action figure was at 16% in April 2026, during a spring rise that many unrelated AI search terms shared. Search for 'ai bigfoot', at 19%, had simply never died away: it was still at 9–14% of its peak week in September 2026. If you missed one, don't save it for next year. The occasion comes back with new trends, like this year's Halloween remakes; the named trend doesn't.

What this means if you're making one

What the medians mean in practice. Any one trend can run faster or slower.

1. Start the clock at the first AI remake

   Not at the original. Bulin 47's freestyle went up on 2 Oct 2026, the first AI swap on 6 Oct, and search peaked four days after the swap. Across the 11 trends with a dated first AI post, the median gap to the peak was 5 days.

2. Post within 4–5 days of the first AI remakes

   In 2026, the most-viewed remake we track for each trend went up a median of 4 days after the first AI version, somewhere between 4 days before and 2 days after the search peak. Hotel Lobby's biggest, 6.1M plays when we read it on 15 Oct 2026, went up on 23 Sep, three days before its peak.

3. Know how long you have after the peak

   Photo prompts give you about 3 days before search halves; video trends about a week. Counted from the first AI post, search was down to half by about day 11 (the median of the 8 trends where we could measure both).

4. Don't wait for the how-to guides

   They tend to arrive after the peak. Kapwing's guide to the earth zoom out went up on 23 Jul 2025, 17 days after search for it peaked and about two weeks after it halved. Its Raindance guide went up on 8 Oct 2026, five days after Raindance's search peak.

5. Check the stage before you start

   Every trend page says whether a trend is rising, peaking or slowing, with the date we read it. Rising or peaking is the window; if it says slowing, you're late. On Jump on the Trend the free preview takes under a minute and the video about 5–10 minutes, emailed to you, so the posting window is the limit, not the editing. See where this week's trends stand.

How to tell a trend is over (and when it's still worth doing)

It's over once search has sat under a tenth of its peak for three days in a row. Under half for three days means the peak is behind it, but that's late, not over. In between, the answer depends on two things: whether it's a photo prompt or a video, and whether people are still posting new versions.

Don't call it on one bad day. Daily search swings, which is why our table only counts a drop once it lasts three days. Burning Bridges fell to 41% of its peak on 14 Oct 2026, its first day under half. Alors on Danse was at 41% the same day, but only after dipping once and climbing back.

After the halfway mark, photo prompts end fast and videos linger. Once search had halved, the 9 photo prompts in our table took a median of 7 more days to reach a tenth. The 5 video trends that got there took a median of 24 more days. Hotel Lobby halved on 29 Sep 2026 and didn't reach a tenth until 11 Oct; Raindance was still at a quarter of its peak on 14 Oct, 11 days after it. So a halved photo prompt is about a week from done, while a halved video remake still has people looking for it for weeks. That's search, not the views a late post will get, but it's the best sign we have that an audience is still there.

Then look at the posts, not just the search. They can keep growing after search drops: Rumpelstiltskin's search had halved by 12 Oct 2026, and three days later its Bonnie and Clyde remake still went from 5.1M to 5.3M plays in a day. Pet trends barely show up in search at all, so new pet versions going up are the only signal. Our rule of thumb: when the top posts have stopped adding plays and nobody has posted a new version for several days, it's done, whatever the chart says.

And if it's for your friends, it's never too late. The curve tells you how many strangers are still looking for a trend, not whether your group chat will laugh. If you want the feed, though, pick one that hasn't halved yet.

How we measured it

We read Google Trends interest over time for each trend's own search term ('ghibli ai', 'bulin 47', 'raindance ai' and so on), worldwide and day by day, on 15 Oct 2026. Google Trends gives relative interest from 0 to 100, not numbers of searches, and its values are sampled and rounded, so small terms are noisy.

Search start is the first day at 10% or more of the peak. Half, a quarter and a tenth are the first day of three straight days below 50%, 25% and 10% of the peak. The first AI post is the earliest dated AI post we could source; where we only had press coverage or a model launch, the row shows when search took off instead, and the 5-day median uses only the 11 trends with a dated first AI post and a clear peak.

The 2026 rows are cut off on the right: their peaks came between 26 Sep and 10 Oct 2026, so the newest have had only a few days to fade. Bulin 47, Burning Bridges and Alors on Danse hadn't halved by 14 Oct, so they're left out of the fade medians; counting them as at least 4 to 7 days leaves the 4-day median where it is. A search term also isn't the trend itself: 'bulin 47' counts people looking for the original freestyle, and 'rumpelstiltskin' and 'smalltown boy' mix in the fairy tale and the song. And the 2026 rows are our own list of trends, all video by design, so the mix of photo and video in the table isn't a market share.

How it compares: a Publicis Groupe APAC study of TikTok trends in seven markets, reported by Marketing-Interactive on 13 Apr 2026, found that nearly half of trends disappear within five days and only a small minority stay relevant after two weeks. Our AI trends follow the same short curve. The article doesn't break out AI trends or photo against video, which is the gap this table fills.