Google’s Motto Was ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

For years, social media users have claimed Google’s company motto was once “Don’t be evil.” In June 2024, for example, one X user made a post (archived) reading: “TIL: Google’s original motto was ‘Don’t be evil’ which changed to ‘Do the right thing’ when they became Alphabet.”

(X user @Dhavalsingh7)

Similarly, in a 2015 post on the r/todayilearned subreddit, a Reddit user wrote (archived):

TIL Between 2000-2015, Google had an informal motto of “Don’t be evil”. The idea was to have a motto that “once you put it in there, would be hard to take out”. When Google began to track users in 2012, there was a public backlash to the motto. The motto was replaced by “Do the right thing” in 2015.

Some internet users, however, have asserted that the saying was never an official motto. Responding to a 2018 Reddit post that asked: “Who specifically decided to get rid of Google’s ‘Don’t’ be evil.’ slogan?”, one commenter wrote (archived), in part: “It was never the official motto anyway.”

Similarly, in a 2023 discussion thread about the motto on the social news platform Slashdot, one commenter wrote (archived):

It was never their actual motto. IIRC there was a division or department that had it as a motto, but not the company. But, yeah, to the extent that it was ever “official” it was retracted LONG ago.

After examining the evidence for Google’s use of the phrase, we’ve determined that the claim is mostly true: Google did use the catchphrase — which a representative for the company described as an “unofficial motto” — in official communications starting in the early 2000s, and it continued to use the phrase at the time of this writing, though to a more limited extent.

History of the Phrase

According to a 2021 Vox article that included interviews with multiple early Google employees, one of two engineers — Amit Patel or Paul Buchheit — came up with the phrase sometime between the late 1990s and 2001, when the company formally adopted it as part of its first written set of corporate values. In his 2011 book “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives,” Wired editor-at-large Steven Levy reported the same general outline of events; according to him, Buchheit first suggested the motto and Patel subsequently popularized it among employees by writing the phrase on whiteboards around Google’s headquarters.

In 2002, as the blog Quote Investigator found when it looked into the slogan’s history in 2018, the phrase “Don’t be evil” made its earliest securely datable appearance on any website associated with the company — specifically, on a landing page titled “Great Jobs at Google,” aimed at potential applicants to positions at Google. (We accessed that landing page, like the other historical Google webpages discussed in this section, in archived form via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.)

A frame on the left side of the “Great Jobs at Google” page contained a list of “10 Things Google has found to be true” followed by a paragraph naming “Don’t be evil” as one of the company’s “most cherished core values.”

(Google/Wayback Machine)

A year later, in 2003, a Wired journalist wrote: “Google’s code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don’t be evil.” In his book “In the Plex,” Levy reported that one early Google employee pointed to this specific article as the moment when the general public became aware of the motto, which had previously been a “sort of silent code” shared by employees.

In 2004, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin prominently featured the motto in a founders’ letter included in the company’s initial public opening prospectus. In that letter, a section with the header “Don’t be evil” read:

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

Also in 2004, the slogan appeared in the earliest available archived version of Google’s corporate code of conduct, which began: “Our informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.”

(Google/Wayback Machine)

As of February 2008, Google removed the phrase “informal corporate motto” from the code of conduct, which now began simply: “Don’t be evil.”

(Google/Wayback Machine)

As part of the same 2008 update, the company also added an additional instance of “Don’t be evil” to the very end of the document, which thereafter concluded by instructing employees: “And remember … don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right — speak up!”

(Google/Wayback Machine)

Following an October 2015 restructuring, Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet, a newly formed public holding company. Alphabet did not use the “Don’t be evil” slogan in any of its publicly available documents, as multiple outlets reported at the time. 

However, Google retained the language in its own code of conduct, as can be seen in an archived version from November 2015.

(Google/Wayback Machine)

In 2018, Google revised its code of conduct to remove mention of the phrase from the preface. The company did not, however, remove the exhortation to “remember … don’t be evil” from the document’s final paragraph, where it remained at the time of this writing.

(Google/Wayback Machine)

An Official or Unofficial Motto?

Media outlets that have covered Google’s idiosyncratic use of the phrase “Don’t be evil” over the years have used various different terms to describe it, including “mantra” and “guiding principle.” Some journalists have described it as an “unofficial motto” or an “informal motto” — the same term the company used in its 2004 corporate code of conduct. In other cases, however — especially in articles written in and shortly after 2004, when Page and Brin used the phrase in their IPO letter, mainstream publications including Newsweek and GQ used more official-sounding terms, characterizing the phrase as a “company motto” or “corporate motto.”

Ultimately, the term “motto” itself is appropriate for the phrase according on Merriam-Webster’s entry for the word, which it defines in part as “a short expression of a guiding principle.”

However, the question of whether it can rightly be described as an official motto is less clear. In addition to Google’s aforementioned use and subsequent removal of the qualifier “informal” in its code of conduct, Google insiders have made statements in interviews that suggest potential internal disagreement about whether the motto was official.

In a 2004 interview with Page and Brin, for example, a Playboy reporter asked: “Is your company motto really ‘Don’t be evil?'” Brin responded: “Yes, it’s real.” When the interviewer followed up by asking whether the motto was part of a “written code,” Brin answered: “Yes. We have other rules, too.” (At the time of this writing, the interview was behind a paywall on Playboy’s website. However, a full transcript of the interview appeared as Appendix B in Google’s publicly available S-1 — the registration form the Securities and Exchange Commission requires U.S. companies to file when they initially go public.)

(Playboy)

Four years later, in 2008, Marissa Mayer — at the time Google’s vice president of search products and user experience — contradicted Brin’s 2004 statement when, in an interview with an Australian newspaper, she said of the slogan: “It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto.”

Asked to describe Google’s current position on the phrase, a representative for Google said over email: “Don’t be evil has been an unofficial motto since the early days at Google and remains part of our Code of Conduct.”

In summary, at the time of this writing Google did not consider “Don’t be evil” anything more than an informal, internal motto, and there is some evidence that this has always been the case. However, the company also used the phrase “Don’t be evil” on a public-facing page for job candidates as early as 2002. Furthermore, Google’s founders, Page and Brin, chose to use the phrase in a letter included with their IPO prospectus in 2004. The same year, Brin responded in the affirmative to the Playboy interviewer who asked if the company’s motto was “really ‘Don’t be evil.'”

Additionally, although the company removed mention of the slogan from its the preface to its corporate code of conduct in 2018, the phrase did still appear at the end of the document in the most recently updated version available at the time of this writing. In other words, while Google no longer appears to embrace the motto to the same degree it did in the early 2000s, the company has never disavowed it or removed all instances of it from its official communications.

For these reasons, we’ve rated the claim as mostly true, meaning its primary elements are demonstrably true, but some of the ancillary details are unsupported by the evidence.

Sources