Ahead of its upcoming landcover update, Google quietly adjusted the coloring of its place labels on August 20, 2020. This is the first time that Google has adjusted the coloring of these labels since Google Maps’s last major redesign in November 2017.

The changes are most noticeable when viewing Google Maps’s hospitality- and lodging-related place labels (which were previously very light and difficult to read)...

...as well as Google Maps’s transit- and transportation-related icons, such as those given to airports:

In most metropolitan areas, the area’s primary airport is often the single, most searched for place in the entire metro—so these changes will undoubtedly make these high interest places easier to spot when browsing and scanning the map.

Google often makes small tweaks to Google Maps’s appearance whenever it adds major new datasets (such as the detailed landcover data that it’s about to add)—so it isn’t particularly surprising to see Google making these kinds of changes right now.

(This page will be updated if Google makes additional changes ahead of the wide release of its new landcover dataset.)