Indicator: “Google announced in a relatively muted fashion that it was killing off support for ClaimReview, the structured data that powered its fact-checking features in Search and News. This is directionally consistent — though far less dramatic in tone and impact — with Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to terminate Meta’s US fact-checking program earlier this year. ClaimReview served to inform Google’s crawlers of the claim and rating contained in a fact-checking article. The information was highlighted to users in different ways across News, Search, Images, and YouTube. I worked extensively on ClaimReview while at Google, including by driving the launch of a dedicated section for COVID-19 fact checks in Google News, and publishing information on the billions of impressions fact checking snippets got on Search. Google hasn’t launched new fact-checking features in a while, leaving them out of About this Result on Search and showing them sparingly on YouTube. A Google spokesperson told me that removing ClaimReview and six other structured data types has no impact on the ranking or the traffic of the affected webpages. In some ways, the advent of LLM-powered Search made this transition inevitable. Google doesn’t need, and users may not want, structured data that comes in categories like “claimReviewed” and “reviewRating.”On the other hand, the company has repeatedly made ClaimReview the centerpiece of its commitment to the fact-checking ecosystem. In communicating its actions to combat disinformation to the European Union last year, Google noted that fact check snippets were seen 120 million times in the first half of 2024 across the 27 Member States. And users claim they seek fact-checking websites much more than AI chatbots when trying to verify the news, according to the Reuters Institute. It is also notable that in discontinuing ClaimReview, the company made no mention of replacing it with a fact-checking feature suited to the AI age.

Fact-checkers meeting this week for their annual conference tell me they were unaware of Google’s plans but not surprised by the decision. Bill Adair of Duke University (and a godfather of ClaimReview) struck a “we don’t need ‘em” tone, posting that the benefits of structuring fact checks go beyond what Google does with them. “There are many products, including some that haven’t been invented yet, that will take advantage of our ClaimReview database,” he said. Indeed, ClaimReview has helped inform a pretty rich corpus of academic research by providing a global database of fact checks. Google will also continue to maintain its Fact Check Explorer...”