The CCDH estimates Google made $10M in two years from anti-abortion organizations' ads misdirecting users to “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not provide care
Study finds the search giant has profited since Roe was overturned from anti-abortion groups buying misleading search terms
Context & Ripple Effects
This CCDH report puts a dollar figure on a problem the related coverage has documented since at least 2019, when backlash forced Google to require US, UK, and Irish abortion advertisers to declare whether they actually provide abortions. The pattern persisted anyway: Bloomberg's analysis found Google Maps routinely steering abortion searches to non-medical crisis pregnancy centers, and in 2022 21 US lawmakers formally asked Google to clamp down on the same misleading results.
What is new is the revenue framing — an estimated $10M over two years since Roe's overturn — which reframes the issue from a moderation lapse into a business line. It also fits a broader corpus finding: researchers have repeatedly shown Google's ad stack monetizing health misinformation, from AdSense and DoubleClick placements in 2020 to the ProPublica analysis of disinfo revenue across three continents.
First-order effects
- Google faces immediate reputational and political exposure: its earlier disclosure pledge and the lawmakers' letter demonstrably failed to stop the misdirection, giving CCDH and the signatories concrete evidence that voluntary policy has not worked.
- Anti-abortion organizations retain a low-cost, high-intent acquisition channel — Google Search ads let them intercept users actively searching for abortion care, with the $10M estimate quantifying what that interception is worth to Google.
Second-order effects
- Regulators and state attorneys general gain a revenue figure to attach to enforcement arguments, making it harder for Google to answer criticism with policy tweaks alone rather than structural changes to how these ads are classified and labeled.
- Legitimate abortion providers are pushed toward costlier organic and alternative channels to reach the same searchers, effectively taxing them while subsidizing their opponents' visibility in the same auctions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — disclosure requirements in 2019, Maps misdirection in 2022, paid misdirection still profitable today — the likely endgame is external regulation of search advertising for health services, replacing platform self-certification with legally enforceable labeling rules.
- More broadly, this strengthens the case that ad-platform moderation failures are systemic rather than episodic: the same infrastructure monetizes health disinformation across regions, suggesting investor and advertiser pressure may eventually force independent audits of what ad auctions fund.
The trend: Search and ad platforms are being pushed from self-imposed advertiser disclosure rules toward externally enforced accountability for how health-related queries are monetized.