Many fake clinics, registered as 501c3 nonprofit organizations, also take advantage of Google advertising subsidies, CCDH says. The grants allow eligible nonprofits to get up to $10,000 worth of advertising per month for free.

CCDH researchers also discovered several marketing companies catering to crisis pregnancy centers and offering services, including help accessing Google advertising grants, as well as strategies to ensure their content appears alongside information legitimate information about reproductive health by hijacking the keywords used by people seeking abortion.

“There is a set of keywords that are clearly abortion search terms, and those keywords tend to be the names of abortion providers,” says Callum Hood, head of research at the CCDH. “Among the top keywords targeted by fake clinics, ‘planned parenthood’ is in the top five.” Planned Parenthood is a true reproductive health organization.

This isn’t the first time Google’s free advertising perks have been given to anti-abortion groups. In 2019, a group of anti-choice clinics run by a Catholic group received tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising on Google. In response, the company changed its policies to require these organizations to disclose whether they actually provide abortion services.

But the CCDH report found that sometimes these labels were still not applied to crisis pregnancy center advertisements. And even then, Shakouri says the label can be confusing to users who don’t know the difference between an emergency pregnancy center and a legitimate health clinic that may simply not provide pregnancy care. abortion. and this labeling has been applied to organizations like abortion funds or to services that act as referral services,” she says.

This confusion extends beyond ads and searches to Google Maps, where crisis pregnancy centers often appear alongside legitimate clinics.

“It’s very difficult for people who are less digitally savvy to know who is a legitimate provider,” says Sanne Thijssen, the creator of #HeyGoogle, which maps crisis pregnancy centers across Europe to help women better identify fake clinics. “Oftentimes, if they see something on Google Maps…they’re not able to really make it out either.”

Martha Dimitratou, media manager for PlanC, a nonprofit organization that provides information about access to the abortion pill, says the organization’s Google Ads account was banned more than a year ago for having advertised “unlicensed pharmacies”.

“We’ve tried to appeal many times, but Google doesn’t want to change the system,” she says.

Meanwhile, Google continues to display ads from crisis pregnancy centers, directing users to sites that promote “abortion reversal,” an unscientific method of administering progesterone to the a woman who has taken abortifacient medications to stop their effects.

Angela Vasquez-Girouxat, vice president of communications and research at the abortion advocacy group Naral, notes that an earlier study on “abortion reversal” had to be halted because the regimen posed a risk. threat to the health of the women involved. “Imagine if there was a study on vaccines that found that vaccines are harmful to humans,” she says. “Google would likely not promote this legitimate diet, but it allows these organizations to continue to promote abortion pill reversal and other false science, despite the fact that it is physically dangerous.”

Aciman says Google doesn’t allow ads promoting abortion reversal treatments.

Updated 6/15/2023, 1:25 p.m. ET: A statement from a Google spokesperson has been added.