Post-death queries for Charlie Kirk dominated Google’s trending searches in 2025. Did Google exploit that moment to smear him? Its routine elevation of Wikipedia suggests as much.
Google released its annual “Year in Search” report on Thursday, revealing the top trending queries for both Google Search and Google News. Kirk was the third most searched name overall, while his assassination was the most searched result in the news category.
The Media Research Center cannot account for the outcome of every Google search result. However, it can confidently say that Wikipedia repeatedly surfaces as a dominant result. In fact, an MRC search for Kirk’s name on Monday displayed an “overview” section with Wikipedia listed as the top-cited website.
This is especially concerning given Wikipedia’s documented smears against Charlie Kirk, who was murdered on Sept. 10 at a Turning Point USA event. MRC unveiled that Wikipedia editors hastily smeared Kirk both immediately after his death and after President Donald Trump posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Among the allegations added by Wikipedia to Kirk’s biography page were accusations that he supported “COVID-19 misinformation,” “white genocide conspiracy theory” and “Christian nationalism.”
The Wikipedia editors also chastised Kirk for promoting “the antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” which the editors asserted was “a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness.”
In November 2025, MRC detailed the close ties between Google and Wikipedia, and how Google routinely props up Wikipedia’s so-called reporting on many prominent current events. These studies followed the MRC’s exposure of Wikipedia’s effective blacklist of right-leaning sources as acceptable citations.
In light of Google’s admission that Kirk was among those topics that dominated search results, a troubling question follows: How many people seeking information about Kirk and his violent death were instead steered toward Wikipedia’s smears rather than accurate accounts of his life and impact?
Despite years of criticism, Google has largely stood by Wikipedia's side since becoming a Wikimedia Enterprise customer in 2022.
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