It’s official: Google has now changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in Google Maps for U.S. users, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to change the name of the body of water.
During Trump’s inaugural address in January, he said he would change the name of the gulf.
“A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said.
Hours later he signed an executive order to do it.
In a post on X on Jan. 27, Google said it has “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.” The company said Maps will reflect any updates to the Geographic Names Information System, a database of more than one million geographic features in the United States.
On Monday, Google followed the updated site listing in the Geographic Names Information System after it changed the new description for the gulf to: “The Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico, with an average depth 5300 ft is a major body of water bordered and nearly landlocked by North America with the Gulf’s eastern, northern, and northwestern shores in the U.S. and its southwestern and southern shores in Mexico.”
It also notes that the change complies with Trump’s order, titled, “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”
The change doesn’t affect what other countries call the body of water or how it appears on Google Maps in other areas of the world. For Canadians, it appears as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” when using Google Maps.
Google maps now shows “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for Canadian Google Maps users.
Google Maps
“The names you see in the Maps app are based on your country location, which is determined by information from your phone’s operating system (e.g., iOS and Android), including your SIM, network, and locale,” Google said in a statement Monday. “If you’re using Google Maps on the web, the names are based on the region you select in your Search settings or your device’s location, if you haven’t selected one.”
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration also issued a notice on Monday regarding the geographical name changes.
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“Please be advised that the FAA is in the process of updating our data and charts to show a name change from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and a name change from Denali to Mount McKinley,” it said.
In another major change, Google’s online and mobile calendars no longer include references to the first day of Black History Month or Pride Month, among other events.
The company previously had those days marked at the start of February and June, but they reportedly don’t appear for 2025. The Verge first reported the removals from Google Calendar late last week, during the beginning of Black History Month.
A Google spokesperson told the outlet that the changes took place in the middle of last year.
“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable.”
“So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments,” the Google spokesperson added.
The company, which has also removed the first day of Women’s History Month in March and Indigenous Peoples Month in June, has stepped back from its diversity, equity and inclusion goals after Trump signed an executive order to dismantle federal DEI programs and ordered the “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
—With files from The Associated Press
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
