Google is losing one of its main sources of information for its Knowledge Graph, the CIA World Factbook. This was a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1962 and 2026 with almanac-style information about the countries of the world.
Glenn Gabe posted about this on X, and noted that The CIA World Factbook is sunsetting. On February 4, 2026, the CIA announced that The World Factbook was discontinued.
And the process has begun, as Glenn wrote, "There are over 7K urls indexed there (for now), but they all redirect to a message about The Factbook shutting down. There are close to 700K inbound links from 20K referring sites. Anyway, it's the end of an era."
Google points to this resouce as one of the top three sources it uses over here. "Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook," Google wrote.
Here are some screenshots of this happening:
Big news, The CIA World Factbook is sunsetting. If you remember, it was one of the key sources fueling Google's Knowledge Graph in the beginning. Now the Knowledge Graph is way more robust, but Wikipedia and The CIA World Factbook were cited by Google as important sources. There… pic.twitter.com/72ZuZVxEYc
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 12, 2026
I assume Google already has a lot of this knowledge stored but we will see if this has any impact on its Knowledge Graph going forward.
Forum discussion at X.
Update: As expected, more pages are dropping out:
Here's the latest search visibility trending for The CIA World Factbook. It was shut down on 2/4. Again, it was a key source of information for Google's Knowledge Graph at one time. https://t.co/SkjkGBwljc pic.twitter.com/JXXxPRlIQh
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 18, 2026
