Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained engagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts remains a challenge. Can people’s curiosity about a topic be stimulated by evidence that the topic has potential value? In two experiments we show that increasing people’s perceptions about the usefulness of a scientific topic also influences their curiosity and subsequent information search. Our results also show that simply presenting interesting facts is not enough to influence curiosity, and that people are more likely to be curious about a topic if they perceive it to be directly valuable to them. Given the link between curiosity and learning, these results have important implications for science communication and education more broadly.