When Taraji P. Henson hosted the BET Awards in July, she told viewers to look up Project 2025. They did. Search interest for Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump term in the White House written by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and other groups with ties to the former president’s administration, peaked in the days after the awards show. Suddenly the focus of the 2024 campaign was about policy, and voters were turning to search to learn more.
Page one of Google has long been among the most important web pages in U.S. politics, but it’s taken on new significance in the presidential campaign thanks to Democratic calls to “Look Up Project 2025.” Democrats didn’t seem ready for what people might find when they followed suit, though. Rather than campaign ads at the top of the search page, it’s nonprofits, think tanks, and news outlets that have savvily SEO engineered their way to the top.
The anti-extremism nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) is among the top-sponsored results when searching for more information related to Project 2025. The group, founded in 2020 by Southern Poverty Law Center alumni Heidi Beirich and Wendy Via, started its campaign in fall 2023, after the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025 the previous spring. A Google Ads campaign using $10,000 in free monthly credits available to qualifying nonprofits drove traffic to a comprehensive report authored by GPAHE on Project 2025, months before it became a top search term.
“That was a way to leverage a resource without having to actually cost the organization a lot of money but build awareness, build engagement, and drive referrals and clicks to their report,” Kindred Motes, founder and managing director of the social impact firm KM Strategies Group, which built the campaign for GPAHE, tells Fast Company.
The campaign used not only search terms directly related to Project 2025, but also search terms for policy areas in the report, like abortion bans and threats to LGBTQ+ rights and equality. The Google Ads campaign for GPAHE has generated nearly 1 million impressions, more than 100,000 clicks, and a 12% click-through rate, Motes says, noting, “It was at the time the most robust and comprehensive summary of Project 2025; what it would actually mean, what it aims to do. They [GPAHE] were looking for ways to build awareness for Project 2025 because it wasn’t really in the public discourse or driving any kind of conversation.”
How to (not) win Google
In July, President Joe Biden asked his followers to google “Project 2025.” His campaign sold stickers that directed people to look it up with a QR code that linked to a campaign microsite with more information. However, if you were to Google “Project 2025” in July, the top result would have been the Heritage Foundation’s website with no links to the Biden campaign’s site. The campaign seemed ill-prepared for people to follow up on its call to action.
Since then, it’s clear Democrats have succeeded in raising awareness about Project 2025—so much so that Donald Trump has tried distancing himself from it. When Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned it in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, she didn’t have to introduce it or ask viewers to look up anything. “We know what a second Trump term would look like,” she said. “It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers, and its sum total is to pull our country back to the past.”
Trump’s campaign isn’t running Google Ads about Project 2025, while Harris’s is, but they’re crowded out by plenty of other advertisers. Web pages from the Heritage Foundation and GPAHE are still among the top paid search results for Project 2025, as are sponsored links from the likes of the labor unions group AFL-CIO and American Rivers, which advocates for healthy rivers and clean water and warns about the environmental impact of Project 2025. Media organizations have sponsored links of their own, including the Texas-based nonprofit, independent news outlet The 19th, which covers gender, politics, and policy and linked to its own primer.
Interest in Project 2025 started on TikTok and Instagram before migrating to search, and Motes says he noticed “there was almost no awareness whatsoever among Gen X and baby boomers” because Google is their primary information vehicle versus millennials and Gen Z, for whom its social media.
“Search is absolutely critical,” he says. “It is not only a place where people find information, it’s a place where information is generated, gathered, and re-created.”