Google Maps Is Calling It the Gulf of America Now, but Why Did They Make the Change?

Millions of people rely on Google Maps to get wherever they're going every day, and now, those people may notice that the app has a new change. Instead of the Gulf of Mexico, the app now refers to that body of water as the Gulf of America.

As people started noticing the change, many wondered what had made Google decide to change it. Here's what we know about why it's called that now, and whether the change is likely to be permanent.

The name change comes after Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the body of water the Gulf of America inside the United States government. Google had previously stated that it has “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.” The company further clarified that the name change will only apply to people in the U.S., at least in this exact way.

“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,” the company said in a statement.

Google also said that they would be changing the name of Mount Denali to Mount McKinley, reverting a change that Barack Obama made in 2015 to honor the area's native population. Google has yet to officially make that change as of Feb. 10.

Trump made both changes in order to “honor American greatness," and went further to criticize Obama's decision to rename the mountain.

What seems clear, then, is that Google is changing the names to abide by Trump's whims, an important reminder of all the small ways that the president can wield the power of the government. What's unclear, though, is whether future presidents plan to abide by the name change or not.

While the name change to Mount Denali is only a decade old, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico might be a harder sell for generations of Americans who grew up referring to it as the Gulf of Mexico. What's more, the Gulf is not actually owned solely by America, so to suggest that the Gulf is somehow American property is untrue.

While that may be its new name inside the government and on major tech platforms, it seems likely that plenty of people will continue referring to it by the old name. What also seems possible is that some future administration could revert the Gulf's name back to what it was before.

It's also possible that, generations from now, it will be a trivia fact that the Gulf was once named after Mexico and not America, at least in the United States. Of course, it's impossible to say what the country and world will look like 50 years from now, so maybe it's better not to speculate.