Belatedly noting that ads have started rolling out on Apple Maps in the U.S. and Canada. 9to5Mac explains where and where they’ll appear (in Suggested Places, and in search results). John Gruber and Oliver Roick have some initial thoughts.
Previously: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps; Ads Coming to Apple Maps: Report; Ads Coming to Apple Maps This Summer (U.S. and Canada); Online Maps Roundup: July 2026.
Per Apple’s announcement of its new Apple Business platform, ads are indeed coming to Apple Maps.
Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.
Apple maintains that the ad platform will come with user privacy protections. “A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.”
From last year: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps; Ads Coming to Apple Maps: Report.
An update on ads coming to Apple Maps. AppleInsider, citing a paywalled report from Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter: “[T]he decision has been taken to move ahead with the project. The claim is that starting as soon as 2026, Apple will allow businesses to pay to have their entries in some way displayed more visibly within Apple Maps.”
Previously: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps.
There’s talk of ads coming to Apple Maps—at least, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility—which, online consternation notwithstanding, is something Google has had forever—when you get right down to it, Google Maps was a way to provide location based search results, and search results were always monetized with ads. Apple started out using its services as loss leaders for its pricey hardware products; now those services are expected to make money themselves.
JSTOR Daily interviews P. J. Mode, the map collector (and donor) behind Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography. Mode began collecting maps in 1980, and proceeded in the usual manner until stumbling across what would become his niche.
When I was looking at those maps in dealers’ shops or catalogs, I often saw other maps that I thought were fun and interesting. I didn’t quite understand them all—unusual maps, strange maps of different kinds. The kind of maps that dealers refer to as “cartographic curiosities” (which basically means, “This doesn’t fit into one of my pigeon-holes…”). These were kind of fun and interesting, and they were inexpensive so, on a lark, I would buy them when I saw them and then I would kind of try to figure out what they were.
[AGS]
Previously: Persuasive Cartography; Another Look at Persuasive Cartography; Persuasive Cartography Collection Expands.
Tim Wallace has amassed a ridiculous collection of map-themed advertisements from the pages of Fortune magazine. Hundreds of them, running in chronological order from the 1930s to the 1960s (when he ran out of steam). On a single web page. (It will probably never finish loading in your browser.)
Bloomberg maps what political ads are talking about in 210 local television markets, and finds some intriguing patterns in terms of what each party chooses to focus on in each local market. [Nathaniel Rakich]
More than 500 maps have just been added to the P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography at the Cornell University Library. That’s almost double the number they began with. Via email, P. J. Mode also says that “Cornell has implemented a much-improved image browser with a very robust search function. I hope there are some things that you’ll find new and interesting!”
Previously: Persuasive Cartography; Another Look at Persuasive Cartography.
Writing for Hyperallergic, Allison Myers explores Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography, the collection of propagandistic maps I told you about last January.
Persuasive cartography: it’s a term I haven’t encountered before, though I’ve seen kind of maps it refers to: propagandistic art that uses cartography to make a point—think of all those caricature maps leading up to World War I. Many of them can be found in Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography: there are more than 300 maps available online, plus some pages about the genre. (Above: a 1951 map from the French Communist Party that takes a pro-Soviet line against the U.S. military.) [via]
