Google Drops ClaimReview, Undermining Verified Information Visibility, Following Meta’s End of Fact-Checking Program
By Mustapha Lawal
In late June, as journalists, researchers, and media professionals gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the GlobalFact 12 conference, Google made a decision that caught much of the fact-checking community off guard.
The company announced via its technical developer blog (described as little-known by Full Fact) on June 12, 2025, that it will abandon a key element of its tagging system for fact checks, effectively de-prioritising this content and making it harder for people to access reliable information. With little public notice and no formal consultation, the company announced it would retire ClaimReview, the structured data markup used to highlight fact-checked claims in Google search results.
Until recently, a Google search could show a ClaimReview result prominently marked with a verdict like ‘False’ or ‘True’.
For nearly a decade, ClaimReview played a critical, if understated, role in helping users identify trustworthy content in response to misleading claims. By allowing fact-checkers to tag their articles with machine-readable metadata, ClaimReview enabled search engines to surface snippets that included clearly labelled verdicts like “False”, “Misleading”, or “True”. These snippets helped guide users to verified sources at a time when the volume of mis- and disinformation online continues to grow at an alarming pace.
The sudden end of this feature has raised serious concerns across the global fact-checking ecosystem. As Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of the Spanish fact-checking organisation Maldita.es and chair of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, wrote in a June 30 post on Nieman Lab, Google did not inform participating fact-checkers that the decade-long collaboration was ending. “Google did not inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone consult with us on the decision to stop using the fact checks that we provided for free,” Cruz wrote.
A Missed Opportunity for Transparency
Google’s rationale for ending ClaimReview is that the feature was “not commonly used in Search” and no longer provided “significant additional value for users”. These claims, however, were not backed by publicly available data or analysis. Moreover, Google’s statement, issued as part of a broader post on technical changes to structured data elements, failed to address the fact that ClaimReview was not designed to drive clicks or commercial performance but rather to serve as a public-interest tool in the fight against false information online.
The removal comes at a time when many internet users are seeking precisely the transparent and verifiable information ClaimReview helped provide. According to the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 25% of news consumers worldwide look for fact-checks when searching online. That number climbs significantly in certain countries: 38% in the United States, 44% in Norway, 38% in Brazil, 32% in Kenya and South Africa, and 37% in the Philippines.
At a time when search engines are integrating AI-generated overviews, many of which are still susceptible to factual errors, commonly known as ‘AI hallucinations’, where the system generates incorrect or fabricated information, the elimination of an established trust signal seems not only ill-timed but counterproductive. As Andrew Dudfield, head of AI at the UK-based fact-checking organisation Full Fact, told Poynter: “For our users, it means we now risk being just another result, particularly as AI search overviews begin to push high-quality website results further down the page.”
Indeed, ClaimReview wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked. It surfaced more than 250,000 fact checks globally, according to Poynter, and was used by dozens of organisations, including PolitiFact, The Washington Post Fact Checker, Chequeado, and Africa Check, among others. In 2019, Google itself estimated that ClaimReview-tagged content received more than 4 billion impressions annually.
An Open Standard, Still Available, For Now
Despite Google’s decision, the ClaimReview schema remains open-source and available through Schema.org. This means that other platforms, developers, and future information systems, including large language models and AI assistants, can still utilise the markup to distinguish verified claims from unverified or manipulative content.
Some fact-checkers are already exploring how to use ClaimReview to train generative AI tools to distinguish fact from fiction more effectively. Bill Adair of Duke University, one of the original architects of the ClaimReview standard, encouraged fact-checkers not to abandon the system: “Fact-checkers should keep using ClaimReview,” he said. “It’s a practical way to denote high-quality fact checks as distinct from the junk content flooding the internet.”
That distinction, between junk and journalism, is only growing more difficult for users to make. The fact-checking community has long warned of the risks posed by AI-generated misinformation, coordinated influence campaigns, and algorithmic opacity. Tools like ClaimReview won’t solve these problems on their own, but they offer a step toward a healthier information ecosystem, one that prioritises transparency and public trust.
The Stakes Are Global
In many regions, including across Africa, fact-checkers work with limited resources and face significant visibility challenges. The removal of even small mechanisms that help direct users to verified information exacerbates these challenges.
The decision also reflects a broader trend: major platforms reducing or ending partnerships with independent fact-checkers. Earlier this year, Meta terminated its third-party fact-checking program, a move that followed growing political pressure in the United States. In this context, Google’s withdrawal from ClaimReview is more than a technical deprecation; it’s part of a pattern of retreat from platform accountability.
For a company that has long claimed to prioritise quality information and “help users make sense of the world”, this decision signals something else entirely: that even widely adopted, low-cost, public-interest collaborations can be discarded without consultation or evidence.
Disproportionate Impact on the Global South
While Google’s decision to retire ClaimReview affects the global information ecosystem, its impact is especially severe in the Global South, where fact-checking organisations often operate with limited resources and minimal algorithmic visibility. In many African countries, for example, fact-checkers face uphill battles against both infrastructure limitations and digital marginalisation. These organisations rely heavily on even modest boosts in search visibility to reach users, visibility that ClaimReview’s structured data once made possible. Without this signal, fact checks are far more likely to be buried beneath misinformation or generic search results. For low-resource organisations, every pixel of visibility matters.
The stakes are even higher given that a significant proportion of users in the Global South access information primarily via mobile devices. Mobile search experiences are more constrained, loading speeds are slower, and attention spans are shorter. In such environments, “rich snippets” powered by ClaimReview offered a concise, trusted verdict that could counter misinformation at a glance. Their removal makes it less likely that users will find fact-checked content before encountering false claims.
This is not merely a technical downgrade; it is a structural setback in the fight for equitable access to verified information. In regions where media literacy is still developing and misinformation is often weaponised for political or sectarian gain, the absence of trusted cues exacerbates the information gap. As Full Fact noted in its analysis, the ClaimReview system was “part of the plumbing of the internet”, a background mechanism that ensured credibility surfaced amidst chaos. When such systems disappear without warning or transparency, the users who suffer most are those already furthest from the centres of power and visibility.
Conclusion
The removal of ClaimReview is not simply a technical adjustment to Google’s search product; it’s a decision that undermines years of work by fact-checkers around the world. It risks diminishing the visibility of verified information at precisely the moment users need it most.
The fact-checking community will continue to do its work. But we urge platforms like Google to reconsider the real-world consequences of decisions that affect the discoverability, credibility, and visibility of truth online. When structured data can no longer be trust, the internet becomes harder to navigate and far easier to exploit.
