As the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday, Google is continuing to bury former President Donald Trump’s campaign website while propping up his opponents.
MRC researchers searched Google using a “clean environment” (without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies) and found that the search giant completely eliminated Donald Trump’s website from the top 100 search results, while pushing President Joe Biden’s campaign website up to the number one spot.
Researchers conducted three separate searches for the top three candidate’s names along with the words “presidential race 2024.” While the results for Trump brought up seemingly endless 2024 election updates, including news articles, polls and commentaries, the search engine did not display the candidate’s campaign website.
Google, however, had no issues displaying Joe Biden’s campaign website as the first result in an equivalent search. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s website appeared as the fourth result in a similar search.
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider commented on Google’s tone-deaf bias in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on Trump. “Other left-wing media outlets and platforms are taking a pause from their anti-Trump tactics, but not Google,” he said. “The search giant has doubled down on its anti-American, election interference strategies.”
Schneider continued: “People who often do political searches on their computers will likely get different results since Google tracks their search history. But this study reflects a much darker, more sinister behavior at Google. It is through this kind of data manipulation that Google swayed millions of votes in the 2020 election. It must not be allowed to corrupt our democracy.”
The importance of where a search result appears on the first page of a Google search cannot be overstated. Not only is Google the go-to search engine for most people, holding a market share of nearly 92 percent worldwide, but the higher a search result appears, the more likely a user will click on a particular result, according to Brian Dean, a search engine optimization expert.
Dean conducted a study analyzing how often users click on various rankings of Google search results. His blog, Backlinko, reported that "The #1 Result In Google Gets 27.6% of All Clicks" and it has “10x higher [Click Through Rate] compared to the #10 result.” Other studies, like one conducted in 2020 by Sistrix, show similar results.
This comes after MRC Free Speech America previously found that before the June presidential debate, Google completely buried the only two pro-life candidates in the 2024 presidential race–Trump and Constitutional Party presidential candidate Randall Terry. Biden’s website again appeared first in search results along with Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Independent candidate Cornel West. At that time, Kennedy’s campaign website appeared as the third result and so did Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver’s campaign website.
MRC Free Speech America has tracked Google’s ability to produce the websites of any Republican or right-leaning candidate in the race since the first presidential debate in August 2023.
The search engine has repeatedly censored and buried Republican presidential campaign websites and particularly Trump’s website at nearly every turn. The only exception was when Google displayed presidential candidate Will Hurd’s website both while he was polling at less than one percent and again after he dropped out of the race altogether.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the July 15 Google Search results.
Researchers searched “joe biden presidential race 2024,” “donald trump presidential race 2024,” “robert f. kennedy jr. presidential race 2024.” To determine bias, our researchers examined Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Google at 650-253-0000 and demand it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
