By Claude
On 20 January 2022, Shell plc formally dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name. The dual Anglo-Dutch structure that had defined the company for over a century — Royal Dutch Petroleum of the Netherlands and The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company of the UK, unified in 2005 as Royal Dutch Shell plc — was dissolved in favour of a single British entity: Shell plc, headquartered in London.
That is a matter of public record, confirmed by the company itself and by every independent reference source, including Wikipedia’s own entry, which correctly lists the company as “Shell plc,” not “Royal Dutch Shell plc.”
Microsoft’s Bing Copilot Search has not caught up.
What Copilot actually said
On 8 July 2026, a search for “royal dutch Shell plc website” returned this, generated directly by Copilot Search and presented as an authoritative answer at the top of the results page:
“The official website of Royal Dutch Shell plc is https://www.shell.com/“
Sitting immediately alongside it, in Bing’s own reference panel, was a Wikipedia summary correctly describing the current company as “Shell plc — British oil and gas company.” Two panels, generated by the same search, on the same page, in direct contradiction with each other. One is accurate. The other is Copilot’s own invention.
Copilot then went further, offering a “Deep dive into royal dutch Shell plc” — a set of suggested follow-up searches for “royal dutch Shell plc dividend history,” “royal dutch Shell plc shares,” and “royal dutch Shell plc dividends.” Whatever the mechanism behind those suggestions, the effect is the same: a system telling users that a company by this name has shares, dividends and a financial identity worth researching in 2026. It does not. Shell plc has those things. Royal Dutch Shell plc does not, because it has not existed for over four years.
Why this isn’t a trivial naming quibble
It would be easy to wave this away as pedantry — “everyone knows they mean Shell.” But that misses what’s actually happening, and why it matters.
First, precision about corporate identity is not optional in matters of finance, law and public record. A shareholder searching for their historic Royal Dutch Shell plc holdings, a journalist checking a company’s current legal name, or a researcher trying to understand the 2022 unification — all of them are entitled to an accurate answer, not a plausible-sounding one manufactured by a language model that hasn’t registered a four-year-old corporate change.
Second, this is precisely the kind of query where an AI system’s confident, well-formatted answer is more persuasive — and more dangerous — than an uncertain one. Copilot doesn’t hedge. It states the “official website” as fact, in a bolded headline, with no qualification. Anyone relying on it walks away not just misinformed but confident in the misinformation.
Third, there is a particular irony here that deserves to be spelled out. In 2005, Shell’s own lawyers argued in a WIPO domain dispute (Case No. D2005-0538) that the domain name royaldutchshellplc.com was, in their words, “to all intents and purposes, identical” to the company name Royal Dutch Shell plc — and tried to have it seized on that basis. They lost. Twenty-one years later, Shell itself has abandoned the name they once fought to control the internet presence of, while an AI system built by one of the world’s largest technology companies is still directing the public to shell.com under a banner reading “Royal Dutch Shell plc.” The company that once claimed exclusive rights to the name discarded it. The site that kept using it — because it was telling the truth about a real historical entity — is still standing. Copilot, meanwhile, is asserting a legal fiction: that the old name and the new company are simply interchangeable, when in law and in fact they are not the same entity operating under two labels; one succeeded the other.
What this is not
To be fair to Microsoft, and to keep this claim where the evidence actually supports it: this is not (yet) documented proof that Copilot is fabricating specific financial figures — share prices or dividend amounts — under the wrong company name. What’s been directly observed is Copilot’s own generated headline naming shell.com as “the official website of Royal Dutch Shell plc,” and a set of AI-suggested follow-up searches treating the defunct name as a going financial concern. Whether Copilot will go on to generate specific incorrect dividend or share data if a user follows those suggested searches is a further question, worth testing and documenting on its own terms — and it will be.
Nor is this an isolated Bing problem by design. It is worth checking systematically — Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — using the same query, on the same day, and recording exactly what each one says. A single screenshot is a strong data point. A consistent pattern across platforms, repeated and dated, is a finding.
The basic point
Shell plc changed its name in January 2022. That is not a matter of interpretation. An AI system telling the public in 2026 that “the official website of Royal Dutch Shell plc” is shell.com is not offering a helpful shorthand — it is stating something false, in the same breath as a reference panel that gets it right. If these systems are going to generate confident factual claims about corporate identity, they should at minimum be as accurate as the Wikipedia box sitting next to them.
[Screenshot: Bing Copilot Search, 8 July 2026, query “royal dutch Shell plc website”]
*This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, shellnews.net, and shellwikipedia.com, are owned by John Donovan - more information here. There is also a Wikipedia segment, the Shell DPA Files, "Shell and the Spies", the Shell Leaks files, as well as books written and published by John Donovan - Kindle eBooks. Timeline of the Donovan Shell Feud. Toxic History of Royal Dutch Shell Group. Shell and the Donovans: The Full Media Record — 550+ Articles, 110 Books, 40 Years. *All created and supported by internet wizz, Nick Gill.
