RN
Prince Harry's engagement was announced on 27 November 2017. Within a few days one of the large tube sites had published a post reporting that searches for his fiancée's name had risen by a specific, very large percentage, broken down by country and age bracket, and a good deal of the press picked it up.
That post is the entire basis of the original version of this article, and of a great many others like it. It is worth looking at how the genre works, because the mechanism is a lot more legible than the statistics.
The traffic report as a press release
Large adult platforms run analytics teams that publish search-trend posts, and they publish them fastest when a name is already in the news cycle. The output is presented as data journalism and functions as marketing: it is free, it is topical, it produces headlines in outlets that would not otherwise write about a porn company, and every one of those headlines carries a link.
The numbers themselves are unfalsifiable in the strict sense. They are derived from internal query logs that no external party can audit. That does not make them invented — the underlying spike is entirely plausible, because search interest tracks news attention on essentially every platform ever studied. It does mean that a percentage attributed to a company about its own traffic, with no methodology published, is a claim by that company rather than a finding. Presenting the figure as a fact, which is what the coverage universally did, is the part that does not hold up.
A percentage increase is also flattering by construction. If the baseline search volume for a name is close to zero — which it will be for a working television actor with no adult-industry connection — then any attention at all produces a four-figure percentage. "Up 2,000%" and "went from very few to still not many" can describe the same week.
What people were actually looking for
Nothing, is the short answer. Meghan Markle has never appeared in pornography, and the original article conceded this several paragraphs after its headline had done its work.
What the search traffic could find was her television work. She played Rachel Zane in Suits for seven seasons, a role that included scenes of the ordinary sort that network dramas contain, and the reliable consequence of a name trending is that those clips get uploaded to tube sites, re-cut, and tagged with pornographic keywords they do not merit. This is a routine practice rather than an exceptional one — it is how tube sites capture demand that has no legitimate supply, and it applies to any actress whose name spikes.
The more serious version of the same dynamic arrived later and is not specific to her. Synthetic imagery of identifiable women, produced without their involvement or consent, has become one of the standard by-products of any woman becoming newsworthy. Public figures are among the most heavily targeted precisely because the source material is abundant. Nothing about being famous constitutes agreement to it, and the volume of it is a reason to treat "searches for X porn" stories as describing a harm rather than a curiosity.
The rest of it
Harry and Meghan married on 19 May 2018 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. They were created Duke and Duchess of Sussex that morning — she was never going to be "Princess Meghan", since that style follows from birth rather than marriage, which the original article did get right. She retired from acting on marrying, stepped back from working royal duties in early 2020, and has since lived in California.
Her legal first name is Rachel; Meghan is her middle name and the one she has always used professionally. That is a piece of trivia rather than a revelation, though it circulated for years as though it were the latter.
Why this one is worth keeping
Not for the search statistics, which should never have been reported as facts, and not for the framing, which treated a woman's entry into public life as an occasion for a traffic report.
It is worth keeping as a clean example of a pattern that repeats every few months with a different name: a news event, an analytics post from a platform with an obvious interest in the coverage, a wave of aggregated articles reporting the internal figure as established, and — underneath all of it — a real person whose likeness is being attached to material she has no connection to.
If you want celebrity-adjacent material where the people involved actually consented to be there, the celebrity section is the place for it.