A few days into a trip in Iceland, I was trying to find a hot spring—but not the kind with a paved parking lot or an infinity-pool edge. I wanted steam, stone, and silence. So I opened Google Maps and did something mildly perverse: I searched for the worst-reviewed spring I could find. After a grueling scroll, I fished up a promising 3.7-star holder, with three ratings and two reviews. “Hard to find,” said one. “Some industrial geothermal boreholes nearby,” noted the other. Sold. What I found was a hot puddle in a shaggy pasture: barely big enough to sit in, faintly sulfurous, with no sound but spitting steam. In other words? Paradise.
What got me there wasn’t just directions; it was data, filters, a map skinned in countless decisions made by companies, algorithms, contributors, and advertisers. The digital maps we use are laden with a massive understory of information that pops up and pings us: ratings, reviews, alternate routes, historical sites, speed traps. Increasingly, our maps drill down into minutiae. But how are these maps actually made?
Beneath the crisp, colorful layers of Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, and their competitors lies a dizzying web of information. Digital maps are highly proficient aggregators. “I think we have about over a thousand third-party sources around the world,” says Amanda Leicht Moore, lead product director at Google Maps.
The cornerstones of maps’ data pools are satellite images and a tireless fleet of Street View cars that roam with ungainly camera hats, constantly refreshing neighborhood-level detail. The National Park Service helps with trails. Government sources like the U.S. Geological Survey collect the names of every small town, stream, and summit in an immense bureaucratic undertaking: The U.S. Board on Geographic Names gathers names from 50 State Geographic Names Authorities, while the Domestic Names Committee is responsible for standardizing them. The results are harvested by map companies. Meanwhile, a vast network of “geospatial data partners”—NGOs, local governments—feeds in the finer details, charting obscure back roads and updating local quirks.
Once that data is in the map, it hits the user-generated content community. “We have 500 million contributors using maps, looking at things, and if they find something that needs updating, they can suggest edits,” Moore says. This legion of ordinary users fleshes out the digital landscape with ratings, reviews, and photos, collectively contributing more than 20 million pieces of information every day. With a base that large, users can be counted on to fill in gaps and note inconsistencies. “Everything is vetted and validated and then kind of refined by our community over time,” she says.
Away from heavily populated areas and roads, the data gets spottier; so, sometimes, map companies must get creative. In 2016, Google strapped cameras to sheep to collect photos of the remote Faroe Islands. Apple Maps deploys pedestrians with shiny, backpack-mounted camera systems to traverse parks and narrow alleys. Go to 22°59’14.8"N 53°46’17.1"E on Google Street View, and you’ll catch a glimpse of an unusual cartographer: a camel, deep in the Liwa Desert, with a camera rig strapped to its hump.
But with billions of pieces of data flooding in by car, by plane, by foot, and by dromedary, who decides what gets put on the map? Digital map companies use machine learning algorithms to make sense of the deluge of data and help determine which updates are worth including. With so much data pouring in, companies also have to make choices about how much to show and when.
“Zoom level is one of the main ways that we balance that,” Moore says. The more you zoom in, the more detail you see; zoom out, and the map will show you prominent landmarks to help with orientation and getting the lay of the land. Sometimes, though, the lay of the land gets controversial. There are no specific laws or regulations that determine which bits of topography to include or naming designations to adopt—so it’s up to each company to create their own policies. “At the end of the day, maps are, in fact, collections of decisions,” says Derek Alderman, professor of cultural and historical geography at the University of Tennessee. “There’s an inherent selectivity that goes into mapmaking: what you include, what you exclude.”
Maps are not just tools for wayfinding, he says: They are deeply political and commercial documents, shaped by decisions about what matters, who gets to be seen, and how the world should be understood.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed. In February, leading navigation app Google Maps updated the name to “Gulf of America” when the name was changed in the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System, which lays out the “Federal and national standard for geographic nomenclature.” A day later, Apple Maps (which vies with Waze for second-most-popular U.S. navigation app), followed suit. For both companies, the change only applies to U.S. users. In Mexico, maps read “Gulf of Mexico”; everywhere else, “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).” (As of publication, mapmaker MapQuest shows “Gulf of Mexico” for everyone; so does U.K.-based OpenStreetMap. Waze doesn’t label large bodies of water.)
When it comes to borders and place names, there’s often no single, objective truth. “I think many people have this idea in their mind that somewhere tucked away is a guy hunched over a table drawing out a map, and it’s sort of cut off from this larger social economic world,” Alderman says. “It’s not true. Maps are, in fact, part of how our social economic world operates, and they are also vulnerable to power imbalances and profit margins.”
Maps are, in fact, part of how our social economic world operates, and they are also vulnerable to power imbalances and profit margins.
And maps have long served as a stage for political struggle. When debates like “Gulf of America” versus “Gulf of Mexico” flare up, it’s not really that map companies have been dragged into the realm of the political—rather, the politics that have always been embedded in the map are rising to the surface.
“As much as a place name appears to be a sort of neutral label that we attach to the Earth, it’s, in fact, a political technology,” Alderman says. “It’s part of how countries envision their own identity, how they project their own identity to a larger world, and it becomes part of how they think about themselves as a nation.”
Maps are a carefully curated, politically charged artifact of human history—but they’re also how most of us get around. “I like to say I have a pretty terrible sense of direction,” says Moore. “I rely on maps day in and day out.” And these days, straightforward directions are the least of what we lean on maps for. Restaurants live and die by their star ratings, and maps are often how people decide what to do in the first place. Last year, Google Maps rolled out activity ideas suggested by AI: Search “things to do in Reykjavík,” for example, and halfway down the results list you’ll see a “Curated with Gemini” section. (I tried it and got recommendations for six different whale watches, which is admittedly spot on for me.)
Modern maps lay down stratum after stratum of recommendation. After another Google Maps update late last year, “If you search for a city, you’ll be able to see the lists of businesses that are trending,” says Moore. “We also have lists curated from third-party partners like Open Table.”
And of course, not everything that pops up on the map is there because it’s beloved or trending. Some of it is there because someone paid for the privilege. A café that appears first when you search “best coffee near me” might have earned its spot with a glowing reputation or with a marketing budget. It doesn’t mean the suggestions aren’t useful—but your route is shaped by more than geography.
It’s a reminder of how much the common map has morphed. Once a flat, folded sheet of paper in the glove box, it’s now a personalized concierge, an advertising platform, a crowd-sourced mood board. Your map today doesn’t just tell you how to get somewhere—it also suggests where you should want to go.
Digital maps are drifting farther from their analog ancestors with every passing update. But Alderman would remind us that maps were never static, straightforward guides to the world anyway. “Maps aren’t just innocent knowledge,” says Alderman. “They are often mobilized not just to communicate knowledge, but to tell us what knowledge is.”
