What the posts show

In the weeks after Charlie Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, posts began to circulate showing Google Trends charts. Each chart had a flat line with one or two sharp spikes dated before the shooting. The search terms were the name of the man later charged, a campus building named in coverage of the shooting, and the tail number of a private plane. The regions were far from Utah, usually the Washington, D.C. or Huntsville, Alabama metro areas.^[8]

The charts are not faked. Anyone can make them. The question is what a spike on one of them means.

What Google says a spike is

Google Trends does not show search counts. It takes a sample of searches, divides each point by all searches in that place and time, and scales the result from 0 to 100. The highest point in whatever window you choose is always 100. Terms with very low volume are shown as zero.^[1]

Google also adds random noise to protect privacy. Its help page says the noise is always present and is most noticeable on searches with little or no interest.^[1]

A Google spokesperson told ABC News in Australia in December 2025 that for very uncommon terms, Trends may appear to show some search interest even if there were no actual searches.^[3]

What independent checks found

The same kind of claim spread after the Bondi Beach attack in December 2025, and it was tested. ABC News could not reproduce the spike the posts described. It did get pre-attack spikes when it ran the attacker's name in Mongolia, Japan and Kenya, which it said showed the method is unreliable.^[3]

AAP FactCheck found that Trends draws a different random sample each time a query is run, so the same search on a different day can produce a noticeably different chart. It noted that similar claims were made after Kirk's death.^[2]

Jacques Raubenheimer, a biostatistician at the University of Sydney who studies Google Trends, wrote that noise can produce strange results on unusual search terms, and that accurate results require combining many samples. He addressed one post about the Kirk case directly, saying its claim of odds of less than one in a billion is incorrect.^[4]

AFNPT's own tests point the same way. Using Ana Escobar's settings, about one made-up or rare phrase in three showed a spike somewhere in the window. The same searches run hours apart returned different dates. The full test record is here.^[5]

What cuts the other way

• Google's written warning is new. Archived copies of its help page from August 13, 2025 and April 20, 2026 do not contain the passage about statistical noise and one-off spikes. A copy from May 16, 2026 does. The warning was added after the shooting. The earlier page did already say that Trends is a sample and that low-volume terms appear as zero.
• Trends is built from real searches. Google describes it as a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests. A spike can reflect a real search. The chart alone cannot tell you whether it does.
• In a later case, Newsweek could not find the spikes that posters shared, but did find a low volume of searches for a suspect's name on two earlier dates. It asked Google whether those could be an error or searches for other people with the same name, and did not report an answer.
• No one outside Google has the raw counts. Until Google publishes them or a court obtains them, nobody can say how many searches lie behind any one point.^{[9][10][11][1][12]}

The dates can be off by hours

Google says charts covering seven days or less use the viewer's own time zone, and charts covering 30 days or more use Coordinated Universal Time. A screenshot taken in one time zone, about an event in another, can place a point hours away from where a reader assumes it sits. That matters when the claim is about what happened the day before.^[1]

The plane

Many of these posts tie the search charts to a private plane that left Provo about an hour after the shooting. The FBI director addressed it eleven days later.^[6][7]

What this means for the court case

Tyler James Robinson is charged with aggravated murder and six other counts. He has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. A judge sent the case to trial on September 1, 2026. Nothing in this article is evidence for or against him. The charges and court dates are here.^[13]