Oct 19, 2026 · Comments ↓

Searches for burnout help are down. Struggling isn't.

Searches for burnout prevention and manager mental health training have halved. The stress hasn't. So what are the falling searches really telling us?

Searches for “how to prevent burnout at work” have halved in a year.

Burnout hasn’t.

So what on earth is going on?

The searches that fell

The figure comes from New Leaf Health, a workplace wellbeing provider. In September 2025 it looked back over a year of UK Google searches, and the results were reported this month. It isn’t just burnout. Searches for “corporate wellness programs” fell by 72%. “Mental health training for managers” fell by 56%. “EAP service” fell by 46%.

Our own LinkedIn page shared the burnout figure recently. Everything else I can find says the need hasn’t moved.

Nearly a million workers in Great Britain reported feelings of stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by work in 2024/25, according to the HSE. That’s 22.1 million working days lost. I’ve written before about how we count the damage and stopped asking why.

Mental Health UK’s Burnout Report 2026 found 91% of UK adults had experienced high or extreme pressure and stress in the past year. That’s the same as the two years before. One of our learners, writing about reaching burnout twice, called stress “a killer”.

Search figures measure searching. They don’t measure struggling.

A word of caution about the numbers

These figures are rougher than they look. A second write-up of the same analysis says searches for “employee burnout symptoms” fell by 100%. That means down to nothing, which tells you the numbers behind some of these percentages are small.

The original article also says the fall might not mean what it seems. People might use different words now. Employers who already have a provider don’t need to search for one.

So nobody can say for certain where the searching went. But there are three likely explanations.

Three likely explanations

1. Some people are asking AI instead

New Leaf suggest this themselves: some of the drop could be people turning to AI tools rather than Google.

We know AI use has taken off. Ofcom found ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025. In the same months of 2024 it had 368 million. That’s nearly five times as many in a year.

I tried it myself on 12 October. I asked an AI tool who to go to for online mental health first aid training in Scotland, the way an HR manager might. It put us top of the list. That’s one check, not a survey, but none of it would show up in Google’s search figures.

2. The words being counted are buyers’ words

Look at the phrases that fell. Corporate wellness programs. Employee wellbeing initiatives. EAP service. Workplace health checks.

That’s how HR and procurement talk when they’re shopping. Nobody describes their own week as an “employee wellbeing initiative”. So fewer of those searches suggests fewer people shopping for services. It doesn’t tell you fewer people are struggling.

3. People are looking for “free”

This one I can show you, because it’s our own data. It’s from this year, so it can’t explain last year’s fall. But it does show what people are typing now.

Between 21 July and 18 October 2026, Google showed our website 1,362 times for searches with “first aid” in them. 596 of those times, the search included the word “free”. That’s 44%.

“Mental health first aid training online free.” “Free mental health first aid course.” “Free online mental health first aid course with certificate.” On and on.

On phones, it was three in every four. And of the ten clicks those searches brought us, seven came from someone looking for something free. Ten clicks is a small number, so I won’t make too much of that.

It only covers searches where our site appeared. And I can’t tell who’s typing. It could be an HR manager with no budget left. It could be someone who wants to help their colleagues and is planning to do it on their own time.

What I can say is that free courses are a big part of what people are looking for when they find us.

Follow the money

Employer training budgets have fallen too.

In 2024, UK employers spent £1,700 per employee on training, according to the Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey. That’s down from £1,960 in 2022, and nearly a third less than in 2011, once you allow for prices. That’s all training, not just mental health.

The Burnout Report shows what thin resources look like from the inside. Almost one in three workers said their employer raises awareness of mental health, but managers don’t have the time, training or resources to actually help. Only about one in four said mental health at their work is genuinely backed with action and resources.

Awareness is cheap. The follow-through is what’s missing.

What falling searches can’t tell you

A fall in searches is a fall in searching. That’s all it is.

It isn’t evidence that people are coping better. It isn’t evidence that the job’s been done. And it’s definitely not a reason to cut what’s left.

If you want to know how your people are doing, don’t look at what’s being typed into Google. Look at who’s off sick, and for how long. Look at whether people feel able to tell their manager they’re struggling. Over a third of workers in the Burnout Report said they didn’t feel comfortable talking to a manager about high stress.

Then ask what in the work itself is making people unwell, and change it. That’s prevention. It doesn’t stop being needed because fewer people are searching for it.

The struggling hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just stopped showing up in the places we were counting.

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