Did Google homepage link to President Trump State of the Union? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Claims are spreading across the Internet that claim tech giant Google chose not to link to President Trump’s State of the Union address from its homepage, something the search engine did for Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.

Many, including President Trump himself, offer this as evidence that Google and other technology companies are politically biased in part of a wider discussion. See the video offered by President Trump below –

Despite the claims that Google did not link to Trump’s State of the Union address, a quick investigation soon reveals that they actually did. The first check should be to one of the Internet’s many archive facilities that show how websites looked during a certain date and time, the most extensive of which is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at Web.Archive.org.

A screenshot of Google’s homepage on January 31st 02.33 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT is a few hours ahead of the time in Washington DC) clearly shows that the search engine did link to Trump’s State of the Union address shown live on Google-owned YouTube, just in the same way they did for President Obama.

Additionally, others had – at the time – posted screenshots of the Google homepage during the speech, including this person on Reddit.

It should be noted that Google did not link to Trump’s speech in 2017 because it was not a State of the Union address, as the president has only been in office a few weeks. Google also didn’t link to Obama’s first address in 2009 either.


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A spokesperson for Google confirmed that Google did in fact link to President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address.

On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage.
We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new president, which is technically not a State of the Union address. As a result, we didn’t include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017

It should also perhaps be noted than on a video tweeted by President Trump that showed the Google homepage from 2012 to 2018, some of those screenshots appear to be fake, since the January 2016 screenshot had Google’s old logo, which was changed during September 2015 and as such should have displayed the new logo.

To surmise, yes, Google did link to Trump’s State of the Union address in their usual fashion. Videos that purport to show that they didn’t are not real.