Yes, Trump’s assassination attempt wasn’t showing up in Google’s autocomplete

Viral social media posts claim that Google is suppressing searches of the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, claimed Google has a search ban on Trump. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted a screenshot showing Trump’s assassination attempt did not appear in Google’s suggested searches and claimed Google is “trying to erase the attempted assassination of Trump.” Other viral posts claimed Google is “manipulating search results” to downplay the attempted assassination of Trump and is “suppressing searches” on his attempted assassination.

VERIFY received many questions about whether Google’s autocomplete feature was not populating searches about the assassination attempt against the former president. 

THE QUESTION

Were searches related to Trump’s assassination attempt not appearing in Google’s autofill search suggestions? 

THE SOURCES

• Google spokesperson
• VERIFY test of Google search

THE ANSWER

Yes, searches related to Trump’s assassination attempt were not appearing in Google’s autofill search suggestions. But Google did not block searches for the event.

WHAT WE FOUND

Google search’s autocomplete feature, which recommends popular search phrases based on words typed in the search bar, was not suggesting searches for the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. However, Google has not prevented people from searching that topic if they write the words themselves.

Google’s autocomplete feature automatically suggests certain searches whenever people type something into the search bar in an attempt to predict what someone might be searching. This has no impact on the final search, or a person’s ability to easily populate common terms.  

According to Google, its autocomplete feature wasn’t suggesting phrases related to Trump’s assassination attempt because of an automated process that excludes suggestions for searches of political violence that haven’t happened yet. Google explained in a thread on X that suggestions relating to Trump’s assassination should have appeared after it happened, but didn’t.

“There was no manual action taken on these predictions. Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date,” a Google spokesperson told VERIFY. “Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high quality information – we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so.”

Google shared the same statement to X.

The Google spokesperson explained that Google has automated systems to protect against violent autocomplete suggestions, which would include protections against suggesting searches about assassination attempts that haven’t actually occurred. 

When VERIFY attempted to search on Google for “Trump assassination attempt” and “assassination attempt of Trump” on July 29, 2024, neither phrase appeared in the list of suggested searches, even after typing out all but a few letters of the phrase. However, VERIFY was able to type the full phrase into the search bar and get a full range of search results. 

As of July 29, the spokesperson said Google hadn’t yet updated its automated system to reflect the recent news and that Google was working on improving those systems.

When VERIFY tried again on July 30, Google search made suggestions related to the assassination attempt. The suggestions included “assassination attempt on Donald Trump” and “assassination Trump.” Google was still not suggesting the exact phrases “Trump assassination attempt” or “assassination attempt of Trump” at the time of VERIFY’s testing.

VERIFY attempted to search “Biden assassination attempt” and “Harris assassination attempt” to test this system with names other than Trump. Google would not suggest either term, even when all but a few letters were missing from the search.

A 2020 Google blog post explained then how its systems automatically prevent violent search suggestions from displaying on autocomplete.

The spokesperson said the suggestions do not affect the search results or impact people’s ability to search for something.