Cốc Cốc has published its Q3 2026 search trends report, and the most useful line in it for SEOs is about a modifier, not the iPhone. Searches for “giá iPhone 18” (iPhone 18 price) rose 2,802% quarter on quarter. Searches for plain “iPhone 18” rose 532%. Vietnamese users aren’t just looking up the new phone. They are pricing it, and comparing it with second-hand handsets, before they buy.
The report came out on 14 October and was covered by Techz, Index.vn and, on Thursday, VTV. Cốc Cốc’s own blog was returning server errors when we checked on Thursday morning, so the figures here come from that coverage.
The top line
- Total search volume across the report’s eight main themes rose 3.6% on Q2. That is slower than the 5.9% Q2 managed over Q1, as we noted in our Q2 trends write-up.
- Technology (+8.1%) and entertainment (+4.2%) are still the two biggest themes.
- Sport grew fastest at +69.0% and moved from fifth to fourth place. That came from the 48-team World Cup and Vietnam’s regional football title. “việt nam vs thái lan” jumped 40,799%.
Price and second-hand queries are the commercial story
Beyond the iPhone 18 price spike, “iPhone gập” (foldable iPhone) rose 551% and “iPhone 18 khi nào ra mắt” (when does iPhone 18 launch) rose 270%. The second-hand market grew alongside it. “iPhone 15 Pro Max cũ” (used) was up 235%, “iPhone 13 Pro Max cũ Hà Nội” 281%, and the question “mua iPhone cũ pin bao nhiêu là tốt” (what battery health is good when buying a used iPhone) 243%. On Android, “Redmi Note 17 Pro” rose 6,940%. Index.vn says much of the interest was in 9,000–11,000 mAh batteries.
This matters because Cốc Cốc’s AI layer doesn’t treat these queries the way it treats informational ones. In our own 100-query test this month, Cốc Cốc showed AI answers on most informational queries but on very few commercial ones. “Price”, “used” and “in Hanoi” queries are where Vietnamese websites still get the click. Retailers and comparison sites should build price pages that change as the price changes, plus city-level used-stock pages and a proper battery-health explainer. A translated global product page won’t do that job.
AI searches are moving from chatbots to tools
ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek remain the most-searched AI names, with Vietnam’s own AI Hay alongside them. The breakout list has moved, though. OpenQuiz AI, an AI flashcard vocabulary app, rose 1,726%. Dola AI rose 1,352% and Genspark AI 108%. “DeepSeek API” grew 80% and “ChatGPT Plus” 27%. Cốc Cốc’s reading is that users are moving from trying AI to putting it to work.
Compare that with Q2, when “DeepSeek V4” searches were up 5,076%, Dola AI 2,476% and OpenQuiz 673%. The model-launch spikes have died down. What is left is searches for specific apps and paid tiers, which is how normal software categories behave. For AI companies marketing in Vietnam, branded search on Cốc Cốc is becoming worth tracking in its own right.
Jobs: out of the big cities
Jobs were Q2’s fastest-growing theme, and in Q3 the interest spread out geographically. “việc làm IT Đà Nẵng” (IT jobs Da Nang) rose 1,375%, “việc làm IT Helpdesk Cần Thơ” 434% and “việc làm IT Khánh Hòa” 91%. Internship queries such as “AI Engineer Intern HCM” (+122%) also grew. Outside IT, “tuyển gia sư” (hiring tutors) rose 3,080% and “tuyển dụng điều dưỡng” (nurse recruitment) 2,787%. TopCV, VietnamWorks, Việc Làm 24h and CareerViet were still the most-searched job sites. Any job board that only has Hanoi and HCMC landing pages is missing demand.
Read the percentages carefully
Two caveats. First, Cốc Cốc only publishes growth rates, never volumes. A 40,799% jump on a match-day query and a 6,940% jump for a phone model tell you about momentum, not market size. Second, the methodology mixes anonymised search queries with browsing data from the Cốc Cốc browser, measured per device. So it describes Cốc Cốc’s own users, partly through what they do in its browser, not Vietnamese search as a whole. That is still a real audience. Cốc Cốc runs a real national index, and for some verticals its users are the ones who type the commercial modifiers.
Opinion: this is the most practical Cốc Cốc trends report so far, because the modifiers make it clear what to build. Price, battery health and city names are content gaps you can fill this quarter. They are also the queries where Cốc Cốc’s AI answers mostly stay out of the way. If you work in Vietnamese ecommerce or recruitment and you’re still producing “top 10 trends” blog posts, you are writing for the type of query AI answers already cover.