Big Tech behemoths have gone to great lengths to promote Wikipedia. Now, Google has been busted actively suppressing an emerging competitor.
Following the launch of Grokipedia, X owner Elon Musk’s “AI-driven” online encyclopedia, Google Search offered an outrageous response to users searching for Musk’s creation: “Did you mean: Wikipedia?” Immediately below this, Google taunted users with the least impartial source possible: a Wikipedia article on Grokipedia.
Yes, Google made Wikipedia the authority on its competitor and its first search result.
And where did Google put Grokipedia? Google buried it on the third page of search results, behind yet another result for Wikipedia’s entry on Grokipedia.
Both Google and Wikipedia are infamous for consistently pushing a leftist agenda and ensuring right-of-center sources don’t see the light of day. MRC researchers busted Google during the 2024 presidential campaign for burying President Donald Trump’s campaign website beneath leftist articles. As if this wasn’t enough, Google rigged the search results for both major party nominees, hiding right-of-center coverage in the results for Oct. 1, Oct. 9, Oct. 15, Oct. 22, Oct. 30 and election day itself. And after the election, Google and Wikipedia both presented users with a cavalcade of vicious attacks on Trump nominees.
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider pointed out what was at stake. “Elon Musk has made clear that he created Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia’s rampant leftist bias. But the monopolists at Google, who rig its search in favor of the left, are hiding his website because they will stop at nothing to preserve the leftist stranglehold on information,” Schneider said “It looks to me like Google and Wikipedia are conspiring to exploit their monopolistic power to harm Grokipedia and to maintain information dominance in their war against American values.”
Hiding and bashing Grokipedia isn’t the first favor that Google has done for Wikipedia. Google frequently puts Wikipedia at the top of search results by using the online encyclopedia for its “knowledge panels,” including for highly negative and biased Wikipedia pages tarring their subjects. Additionally, the search giant gave no less than a combined $7.5 million to Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia Foundation, and its fund, Wikimedia Endowment.
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Google also buried Grokipedia under multiple Reddit posts and a barrage of hostile press that included only a single right-leaning article from Fox Business.
In fact, Grokipedia was the 24th result behind a hatchet job from the leftist Wired magazine headlined “Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points,” which proclaimed in its preview that Grokipedia “falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic.” The article whines about the lack of a “gay marriage” page and attacks the encyclopedia for referring to biological reality and women’s safety on the “transgender” page.
The Wired article appeared three times on the first page, including once through a Reddit repost. It was featured as a “Top Story” alongside coverage from other outlets on the left, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Associated Press.
Both Google and Wikipedia heavily rely on such elitist media outlets while burying or banning outlets on the right. For example, MRC researchers found that Google often fails to show any right-of-center search results for nominees like now-War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Instead, the Google results for the candidates were filled with leftist media and vicious headlines from far-left publications as large and small as MSNBC or Inside Climate News. In one case, Google included a Vanity Fair article pushing the actress Cheryl Hines to divorce Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
This behavior was par for the course at Wikipedia as well. In fact, MRC researchers exposed Wikipedia for pushing similar narratives against the same Trump nominees targeted by Google.
For example, Wikipedia editors stripped some of Hegseth’s war medals from his infobox and diminished the space on his page devoted to them. Wikipedia editors outrageously tried to justify this as an effort to avoid giving “undue emphasis” to Hegseth’s service. Instead, they made room for more personal attacks, while removing exculpatory information in favor of vicious additions.
And while Google buries right-of-center stories, Wikipedia simply bans them.
In February, MRC researchers uncovered that Wikipedia effectively blacklists 100 percent of right-of-center media on the AllSides Media Bias Chart from being cited as a source, while greenlighting the vast majority of left-of-center sources. Since then, Wikipedia greenlit a single right-of-center source on the chart, The Washington Free Beacon. By contrast, Wikipedia continues to effectively ban reputable publications such as The Daily Wire and the New York Post while allowing radical leftist sources like Mother Jones and MSNBC. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who recently condemned this blacklist in an interview, labeled the encyclopedia as “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.”
Methodology: MRC researchers conducted a Google search for “Grokipedia” on Tuesday, using the Brave browser and its paid VPN feature to avoid any influence from cookies or prior search history on the results.
MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.”
Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.
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