Modelo Especial has been America’s best-selling beer by dollar sales since 2023, and Michelob Ultra overtook Bud Light as the volume leader in 2025. Neither shows up the way you’d expect in search data. We pulled Google Ads keyword search volume for 35 major national and regional beer brands across all 50 states, and the pattern that came back wasn’t close: Blue Moon is the single most-searched beer brand in 34 of 50 states, Michelob Ultra wins 14 (its own sales lead shows up here too), and Yuengling takes the remaining 2. Modelo Especial, despite leading the country in dollar sales, doesn’t win a single one.
Why the Best-Sellers Never Show Up
This isn’t a contradiction, it’s what search volume actually measures, and it splits the country’s two best-sellers in different directions. Modelo Especial is in every corner store cooler, priced deliberately as an everyday choice, so nobody needs to search it, the brand is already fully resolved in a shopper’s head before they walk in, same story for Bud Light and Coors Light. Michelob Ultra is the exception: even as the current volume leader, it still carries a distinctive enough pitch (the low-carb, active-lifestyle angle) that people search to confirm a calorie count, check a flavor variant, or settle whether it counts as a light beer, which is likely why it shows real search demand in 14 states despite also topping the sales charts. Blue Moon works the same way for a different reason, a fruit note and seasonal variants keep people checking specifics. Search volume tracks curiosity and differentiation, not just shelf share, the same gap we found in our popularity paradox study between review volume and actual quality.
Where the Regional Upsets Happen
Two states break the Blue Moon/Michelob Ultra pattern entirely, and both make sense on the ground:
- Michigan: Yuengling wins at 8,100 monthly searches, ahead of Blue Moon’s 6,600. Yuengling is a Pennsylvania brand with no major Midwest brewing presence, which is exactly why it generates search volume there, people are looking up where to find it rather than reaching for it on autopilot.
- Iowa: same story, Yuengling edges out Blue Moon 1,900 to an unlisted lower figure. A brand’s absence from local shelves, not its popularity, is what drives the search.
Texas produced the closest race in the whole dataset: Michelob Ultra and Blue Moon tied exactly at 22,200 monthly searches, both far ahead of Coors Banquet (14,800) and Shiner Bock (12,100), Texas’s own hometown brand, which never wins its own state. Yuengling itself shows up as a supporting player throughout our whole brewery dataset too, it’s one of the highest cross-platform-rated breweries we tracked and stayed open the standard weekly hours we measured in our hours-vs-rating study, so its two state wins here aren’t a fluke of an obscure brand, it’s a genuinely well-regarded one that just happens to be regionally scarce outside Pennsylvania.
The Full State-by-State Table
| State | Most-searched beer | Monthly search volume | Runner-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | Michelob Ultra | 2,900 | Blue Moon |
| Alaska | Blue Moon | 390 | Guinness |
| Arizona | Blue Moon | 5,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| Arkansas | Michelob Ultra | 1,600 | Blue Moon |
| California | Blue Moon | 33,100 | Michelob Ultra |
| Colorado | Blue Moon | 5,400 | Guinness |
| Connecticut | Blue Moon | 2,900 | Guinness |
| Delaware | Blue Moon | 2,900 | Michelob Ultra |
| Florida | Blue Moon | 14,800 | Michelob Ultra |
| Georgia | Blue Moon | 8,100 | Michelob Ultra |
| Hawaii | Michelob Ultra | 880 | Blue Moon |
| Idaho | Blue Moon | 880 | Coors Light |
| Illinois | Blue Moon | 9,900 | Guinness |
| Indiana | Blue Moon | 4,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| Iowa | Yuengling | 1,900 | Michelob Ultra |
| Kansas | Michelob Ultra | 1,600 | Blue Moon |
| Kentucky | Michelob Ultra | 2,400 | Blue Moon |
| Louisiana | Michelob Ultra | 2,400 | Blue Moon |
| Maine | Blue Moon | 1,000 | Guinness |
| Maryland | Blue Moon | 5,400 | Guinness |
| Massachusetts | Blue Moon | 8,100 | Guinness |
| Michigan | Yuengling | 8,100 | Blue Moon |
| Minnesota | Blue Moon | 4,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| Mississippi | Michelob Ultra | 1,600 | Blue Moon |
| Missouri | Blue Moon | 3,600 | Michelob Ultra |
| Montana | Blue Moon | 1,000 | Michelob Ultra |
| Nebraska | Blue Moon | 1,300 | Michelob Ultra |
| Nevada | Blue Moon | 2,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| New Hampshire | Blue Moon | 1,000 | Guinness |
| New Jersey | Blue Moon | 9,900 | Guinness |
| New Mexico | Blue Moon | 1,600 | Coors Banquet |
| New York | Blue Moon | 22,200 | Guinness |
| North Carolina | Blue Moon | 8,100 | Michelob Ultra |
| North Dakota | Michelob Ultra | 390 | Busch Light |
| Ohio | Blue Moon | 6,600 | Michelob Ultra |
| Oklahoma | Blue Moon | 2,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| Oregon | Blue Moon | 4,400 | Guinness |
| Pennsylvania | Blue Moon | 12,100 | Yuengling |
| Rhode Island | Blue Moon | 880 | Narragansett Beer |
| South Carolina | Michelob Ultra | 2,900 | Blue Moon |
| South Dakota | Michelob Ultra | 390 | Busch Light |
| Tennessee | Michelob Ultra | 3,600 | Blue Moon |
| Texas | Michelob Ultra | 22,200 | Blue Moon |
| Utah | Blue Moon | 2,400 | Michelob Ultra |
| Vermont | Blue Moon | 480 | Guinness |
| Virginia | Blue Moon | 6,600 | Michelob Ultra |
| Washington | Blue Moon | 6,600 | Rainier Beer |
| West Virginia | Michelob Ultra | 880 | Blue Moon |
| Wisconsin | Blue Moon | 5,400 | Yuengling |
| Wyoming | Michelob Ultra | 260 | Blue Moon |
What We Pulled and How
We ran Google Ads keyword search volume (via DataForSEO, using Google’s own Keyword Planner data) for a fixed list of 35 major national and regional beer brands, at the state level, for every US state. The list covered the biggest national macro brands (Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, Modelo Especial, Corona Extra, Michelob Ultra), well-known craft and import names (Yuengling, Guinness, Heineken, Blue Moon, Stella Artois, Samuel Adams, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale), and a set of regional favorites (Shiner Bock, Rainier Beer, Genesee Beer, Iron City Beer, Narragansett Beer, Straub Beer) to make sure a local hometown pick had a fair shot at winning its own state. For each state, we took whichever brand had the highest average monthly search volume over the trailing 12 months.
What This Doesn’t Tell You
Search volume is a curiosity signal, not a sales figure, and we’re not claiming otherwise. It also can’t separate why someone searched a brand, whether they wanted a nutrition label, a store locator, or just to settle an argument, all get counted the same. And a keyword list of 35 brands, however broad, still leaves out hundreds of smaller regional and craft names that might win their home state outright if we tested them individually.
This is the same gap we kept finding across our whole brewery dataset: our social media data study found follower counts track buzz, not quality, our platform adoption piece found being on more platforms doesn’t predict who closes, and our closure-risk score and confirmed nanobrewery closures both found that visible, measurable signals rarely predict what actually happens to a business. Search interest in a beer brand is no different, it measures attention, not outcomes. We also cited real 2025-2026 figures on production costs and closures in our cost-crisis piece, worth reading alongside this one if you want the industry-level picture behind these state-level search patterns.
Get the Raw Data
The full pull, all 35 brands x all 50 states, is available as a downloadable CSV: state, beer brand, and monthly search volume for every combination we tested.
Explore the Data Interactively
Pick any state from the dropdown to see its own top 5, not just the single winner shown in the map above.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn’t Modelo Especial win any state, when it’s the country’s best-selling beer by dollar sales?
Because search volume measures how often people look a brand up, not how often they buy it. Modelo Especial, Bud Light, and Coors Light are already so familiar and widely stocked that there’s little reason to search for them by name. Blue Moon and Michelob Ultra generate more searches because people are actively checking something about them, a flavor variant, a nutrition fact, or where to find one, which is also why Michelob Ultra, now the volume leader too, still shows up as the top search pick in 14 states.
Is this the same as a “best-selling beer by state” ranking?
No. Actual sales data by state comes from distributor and retail scanner data, which we did not have access to for this piece. This is purely a Google search demand signal, and we’ve been explicit throughout that the two measure different things.
Which brand won the most states?
Blue Moon, in 34 of 50 states, including the three highest-volume states in the whole dataset: California (33,100 monthly searches), New York (22,200), and a tie with Michelob Ultra in Texas (22,200 each).
References
- DataForSEO, Google Ads Keyword Data API, search volume pull across 50 US states, September 2026
- Our earlier popularity paradox data study
