In 2018, Google was first confronted by media reports investigating why crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)—often religious, non-medical organizations that do not provide abortion services or referrals for abortion services—frequently dominate Google Maps search results for “abortion clinics.” Now, four years later, the tech company seems to be making some moves to potentially change the quality of these sorts of search results.

In response to a Bloomberg report that “Google Maps routinely misleads people looking for abortion providers,” Google says it is “actively” seeking to improve the relevancy of search results of categories of businesses like “abortion clinics.” It seems that currently, search results based on business categories aren’t as relevant as the similar business results displayed following searches for specific business names.

The question being aimed at Google is whether its ongoing practice of displaying CPCs in results for abortion clinics qualifies as spreading health misinformation. Women claiming they were misled by Google Maps say the CPCs they visited went to extremes to dissuade them from seeking an abortion. That included relaying “misinformation about the abortion procedure, including risk to life, risk of breast cancer, risk to mental health, risk to future fertility, and fetal pain.”

On average, a quarter of results for anyone searching for US abortion clinics on Google Maps directs users instead to visit CPCs, and in about a quarter of the country, CPCs comprise more than half of search results.

This is surely a problem for those validly searching for safe and legal abortion services, as some states have banned abortion—shrinking the number of available US abortion clinics. It's expected that people seeking services outside those states will plan to travel farther to find services in areas that are less familiar, many relying on Google Maps to find the closest nearby businesses.

Advertisement

Because Google Maps search results by category of business often display similar businesses instead of indicating when there are no relevant results nearby, experts say that as abortion access is restricted, CPCs could dominate results, leading more users to risk encountering abortion misinformation. Worse, some users may travel long distances to visit businesses that do not really provide abortion services. This problem isn’t necessarily just limited to the category of business searches, either. In some cases, the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation has shown that CPCs “deliberately” use similar or sometimes the exact same business names as existing abortion providers. This contributes additional confusion, even for Google Maps users who are searching for specific business names (not just conducting general "abortion clinic" searches).

Bloomberg says that their analysis of the “abortion search result problem” is the most extensive conducted publicly so far. They collected data from 50 states, interviewed women who were directed to CPCs by Google Maps after searching for “abortion clinics,” and fielded insights from “33 abortion care providers, reproductive justice, and digital rights experts.”

Responding, Google told Bloomberg that “it works hard to surface business results that are relevant, accurate, and help users find what they’re looking for,” claiming to swiftly remove any business that misrepresents itself once it learns of violations to its policies against such behavior. The company also says that it has added “extra layers of verification” to confirm that businesses marked as “abortion clinics” on both Google Search and Maps “actually offer abortions.” One example is a Google policy update where advertisers have to certify that they provide abortion services to run ads with keywords “related to getting an abortion,” but Bloomberg notes that “it’s unclear whether Google would be able to apply that knowledge to its maps results.”