Google Adds The “Gulf Of America” To Google Maps For Almost The Entire World

During Trump’s inauguration, he announced his intention to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world,” he said at the inauguration, per AP. “A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”

Following the change, Google quickly announced it would update maps to comply.

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the tech giant announced on X. 

“For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.”

In a new announcement, Google said that it had implemented that change. Rather than just affecting the USA, the change will be seen in almost the entire world.

“As we announced two weeks ago and consistent with our longstanding practices, we’ve begun rolling out changes to reflect this update,” Google said in the update. “People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Gulf of America,’ and people in Mexico will see ‘Gulf of Mexico.’ Everyone else will see both names.”

Following the update the only place in the world where the Gulf of Mexico will solely be called by the name it has had since the late 16th century will be in Mexico. 

The update appears to have been implemented across Google’s search function too, with “(Gulf of America)” popping up as a suggested search when you type in the Gulf’s actual name, the Gulf of Mexico.

This is not the only change going on at Google following the beginning of Trump’s second term and the US government’s general attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. At the beginning of February, the company abandoned its goal to hire people from underrepresented backgrounds.

“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there,” the company said, per the Guardian. “We’ve updated our 10-k language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

On top of this, the company has also stop adding other inclusive events to its calendar, including Black History Month, Women’s History Month, LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and Indigenous Peoples Month. Though this change certainly lines up with Trump’s policies, the company says that the change took place mid-2024.

“For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld told The Verge. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing – and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”