If your website embeds Google Maps, and it is currently showing “Lake America” instead of “Lake Ontario”, here is how to fix it.

Over the weekend, “Lake America” started appearing on Canadian websites. Hydro One’s outage map, the LCBO store locator, GO Transit’s station finder and a federal government infrastructure map were all reported to be affected, and the Ontario government announced a review of its own sites. Google had said the new name would only be shown to users in the United States.

After reading the coverage, we checked our own court maps, and some of them were showing “Lake America” too.

The technical root cause is that these websites, ours included, were relying on the “default” edition of Google Maps. When a website shows you a map, it is not running the Google Maps app; the developer has borrowed a piece of Google’s mapping service and loaded it into the page through a web address, in much the same way you would embed a YouTube video. That address can carry a setting called region, which tells Google which country’s edition of the map you want drawn. If nobody sets it, Google’s own documentation is candid about what happens: the map defaults to a United States bias, and every visitor will see the American map, regardless of where they are.

So, the fix is to say which edition you want, by adding region=CA to the address that loads the map:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=YOUR_KEY&callback=initMap&region=CA

Once you make this change, Google will draw on the Canadian version instead and Lake Ontario will be shown. See the two live maps below. One does not specify the region, while the other one does. The only difference between them is that the one on the right has region=CA on the end of its address.

The only real work is finding the address, because it lives in a different place depending on how your site uses Google Maps. If a developer built the map, look for a script loaded from maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js and add &region=CA to its address. If the map is an embedded iframe, its src will begin with google.com/maps/embed/v1/, and &region=CA goes on the end of that. If you are on a WordPress plugin or a vendor product, there is usually a Region or Country field somewhere in its settings, and if there is not, it is a reasonable two-minute request to make of whoever built it.

Once the change is in, clear your site’s cache, reload, and zoom the map out until Lake Ontario fills the screen. If you have a way to check from a US connection, do that as well.

Needless to say, the lake’s name has always been Lake Ontario, and it will remain Lake Ontario.