Google Search, Maps will identify confirmed veterans hospitals and abortion providers

Google is rolling out a change to Maps and Search that explicitly notes whether a place provides a specific, confirmed service, starting with healthcare facilities that offer abortions and veterans hospitals.

For example, when you look up “veterans hospitals near me” in Search or Maps, a “Veterans hospitals” chip with a check mark will appear and only places that have been confirmed by Google to offer those services will get listed.

When you search for “abortion clinics near me,” Google will note “Provides abortion.” You might also see a “Might not provide abortions” label when the company doesn’t have confirmation, while there will be a prompt to “Search farther away” when there aren’t relevant places nearby. That button will also appear for mental health clinics, physiotherapy centers, and travel clinics. This follows similar steps by other online directories this week.

• Google Location History will soon auto-delete visits to abortion clinics

Google says it gets confirmations by working with authoritative data sources and calling businesses. That is the extent of this feature today, but the company said these confirmations will come to more types of places over time. It builds on Google’s work to let people search for specific COVID vaccines and types of EV chargers.

When people turn to Google to find local information, we aim to help them easily explore the range of places available so they can determine which are most helpful to them. For a number of categories where we’ve received confirmation that places offer specific services, we’ve been working for many months on more useful ways to display those results. We’re now rolling out an update that makes it easier for people to find places that offer the services they’ve searched for, or broaden their results to see more options. We get confirmation that places provide a particular service in a number of ways, including regularly calling businesses directly and working with authoritative data sources. We followed our standard testing and evaluation process to confirm that these updates are more helpful for people.

—Google spokesperson