Google has renamed the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in its Maps application for users in the United States.
The company started implementing the change after the U.S. government updated the name on its official maps, Google said in a statement on Monday. President Trump ordered U.S. authorities to make the change to official maps in an executive order he signed on his first day in office.
Only users in the United States will see Gulf of America, the company said. Users in Mexico will continue to see Gulf of Mexico, while people in the rest of the world will see both names, with Gulf of Mexico appearing first, followed by Gulf of America in parentheses.
When Mr. Trump signed the order last month, Google confirmed that it would update its maps to reflect the change as soon as the U.S. government updated the name on its official maps.
Google has a “longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the company said in a post on X on Jan. 27.
The Department of the Interior had said that it was implementing the executive order, but that official government maps had not yet been updated from the Geographic Names Information System, or G.N.I.S., which is a part of the U.S. Geological Survey.
That happened on Sunday, according to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who posted a screenshot to X of the U.S. Geological Survey website with the Gulf of America name. “It’s official!” his post read.
This is not the first time Google has used different names on its maps for a single location. It labels the body of water between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which has been the subject of naming disputes for decades, under two names for international users. For those in Iran, it shows up as the Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf). In Arab countries near the body of water, Google Maps calls it the Arabian Gulf.
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