Google Search has always had one serious drawback — if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to click on a fraudulent site that’s mimicking a real business. Now, the company appears to be testing a long-overdue solution: blue verified checkmarks that show a company is legitimate.
The checks started appearing next to official site links for corporations including Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon, according to a report from The Verge. The checks aren’t showing for all users, though, and Google confirmed that the feature is still in testing.
“We regularly experiment with features that help shoppers identify trustworthy businesses online, and we are currently running a small experiment showing checkmarks next to certain businesses on Google,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge.
If you hover over a checkmark, a message pops up stating “this icon is being shown because Google’s signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is. Google can’t guarantee the reliability of this business or its products.”
The implementation appears to be based on Google’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) feature. That first appeared for Gmail, adding authenticated logos for emails from participating companies. The implementation is different in the Search tests, but may draw from the same database of organizations.