Which countries risked it the most?
At 7.13pm BST on Wednesday, the moon covered 91% of the sun over London. Within hours, Google searches for "eclipse eye pain" were up 1,750% worldwide against the two days before. People had been told all week not to look without solar eclipse glasses. A lot of people looked without wearing them.
We wanted to know which country looked hardest. So we pulled Google's search data for every single country in the eclipse zone and compared each one against its very own normal level of eye pain searching. The result was not the one we expected.
Spain worried most. Yes, Spain.
Spain saw the real thing. The band of totality crossed the north of the country, Madrid got 99.9%, and the country has been preparing for this for years, because Wednesday was the first of three Spanish eclipses in three years. None of that stopped Spanish eye pain searching climbing to roughly two and a half times its normal level across eclipse day and the day after, the biggest rise anywhere in Europe. It was not just searching, either. Spanish hospitals reported more than 300 eclipse related eye consultations in the days that followed, most of them mild.
Britain and Belgium are joint second, both running about two thirds above their usual level with the Netherlands just behind. Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Portugal registered small rises.
And then there's Ireland which had a deeper eclipse than London and showed essentially no rise. Either the Irish are Europe's most sensible sun watchers or it was cloudy over Dublin at ten past seven. We are looking into it.
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Scores show each country's eye-pain search interest during 11 to 13 August as a multiple of its own pre eclipse level. 1.00 means no change. Countries with too little search data to measure reliably are excluded. The full list and the checks we ran are in the methodology below.
Why we didn't just count searches
The obvious way to build this table would be to rank countries by how much they searched for eye pain on the night. But that is wrong and here is why.
Poland tops the raw table. But Poland tops that table most weeks because some countries simply search about eye pain more than others, eclipse or no eclipse. Thailand, which saw nothing on Wednesday, out scores every European country on raw numbers. So we compared each country with itself instead... its share of eye pain searching during the eclipse window against a normal period. Countries that never saw the eclipse land almost exactly at 1 on this measure which is how we know it works. Poland falls from first to fifth and Spain rises to the top.
Still worried about your eyes?
The retina has no pain receptors. You can damage it and feel nothing at the time which is why no eye pain on the night does not mean you are in the clear.
The condition is called solar retinopathy, a burn to the light sensing tissue at the back of the eye. After the UK's last big eclipse in 1999, around 70 people presented at eye departments with some level of it and about 40% of them had looked for under a minute, according to the Royal College of Ophthalmologists. Symptoms usually arrive a few hours to sometimes even a couple of days after exposure which is exactly when the search spike happened.
The symptoms to look out for are blurred or distorted vision, a dark or blank patch in the centre of your sight, colours looking washed out, or new difficulty reading. Sore, gritty eyes on the evening itself can simply be surface irritation and often settles on its own.
Most solar retinopathy improves by itself over weeks to months. Some do not and there is no proven treatment, so this is not one to wait out alone. If anything on that list applies to you, book an optometrist appointment now and tell them you watched the eclipse. They can photograph your retina and tell you what is actually going on. If your vision is getting worse quickly, call 111.
One thing this article is not: a diagnosis. Please see an optometrist if you have eye pain.
The rerun is already booked
On 2 August 2027 the moon does this again and it will be an even bigger event. Totality crosses southern Spain and North Africa, lasting over six minutes near Luxor, the longest anyone on land will see this century. Most of Europe, Britain included, gets another deep partial. We will run this analysis again the day after and find out whether anyone learned anything. Our prediction is that the same countries top the table.
Methodology
Data: Google Trends, 'Eye pain' topic, interest by country, worldwide. Topic rather than search term was used to group terms in different languages ('me duelen los ojos', 'Augenschmerzen', 'ból oczu', etc.
Windows: eclipse period 11 - 13 August 2026 and the baseline period 4 - 6 August 2026.
Score: each country's eclipse window search share was divided by its baseline share. Because Trends measures share of a country's own total searching, every country is only ever compared with itself, which strips out both national search habits and how well the topic captures each language.
Obscuration figures: Unistellar's city guide, cross checked against the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
