Why doesn't Bud Light have a dedicated Wikipedia article?

How a throwaway line in a television show sent me down a meandering investigation into nothing.

Note: I had an element wrong in the following article regarding timelines around when the first Bud Light page was created. You will see in bold my edits around the details below.

I’ve been curious about Taylor Sheridan’s television shows for a while. I like his movies (especially Sicario and Hell or High Water) and it seems like his shows are a significant piece of today’s zeitgeist. While I should have probably used Yellowstone as my entry point, I started instead with Landman. I chose it for two reasons: a friend of mine recommended it and it has Jon Hamm in it.

After watching seven episodes of Landman, the main thing I’ve learned about Taylor Sheridan is that either a) he’s obsessed with Michelob Ultra (a beer I’ve never tried) or b) Anheuser-Busch paid him an awful lot of money to write a show where the protagonist is obsessed with Michelob Ultra.

The character in question is an oilman played by Billy Bob Thornton, who “quit drinking” years ago and now only drinks Michelob Ultra. He either mentions or drinks it in nearly every scene of the show.

Now, I want to be clear about something: I don’t mind product placement when the products add a sense of realism to the character. It’s distracting when a work of fiction tries too hard to avoid mentioning products, like when people say “I’ll have a beer” at a bar and the bartender hands them a beer without asking what kind they want. No one does that. That doesn’t happen in real life. You see what they have and you order based on that info and your own set of tastes.

The brands or products a character prefers can tell you a lot about that character, whether it’s Patrick Bateman carrying a body in a Jean-Paul Gaultier garment bag, Dennis Hopper drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon in Blue Velvet, or Walton Goggins wearing a Timex in The White Lotus. (Note that none of those are legitimate product placement, as far as I know, but they are the use of real products to add depth to a character.)

Perhaps the most brand-obsessed character in cinema history./

Then you have Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and his obsession with Michelob Ultra. I could accept it, at first, because it seemed that he preferred the beer based on its low alcohol percentage. He considered it to be “not drinking” and had several arguments about it. He is a mean character who treats bartenders like shit, so it seems odd that Michelob Ultra would want to be associated with this guy, but maybe that’s what they’re going for.

Then there’s the scene that made me pause the show and not un-pause it since. It’s not that the scene offended me. It’s that it simply made no sense.

As gracefully recapped by Dave Infante in the excellent article What’s With All the Michelob Ultra Placements in ‘Landman’?, the scene that broke my sense of realism goes like this:

“We’re having a special on Bud Light,” a server tells Norris and his crew in the show’s seventh episode.

“I bet you are,” replies Norris.

“Yeah, how’s that working out for you?” his associate follows up, with a snort.

“Like a popcorn fart in church,” she concedes.

Eventually the group orders a pitcher of Michelob Ultra for the table.

The reason this scene left me feeling so stumped—and ultimately led me to google “Bud Light” and “Michelob Ultra” and “Michelob Ultra product placement” and a series of other related terms—is that Bud Light and Michelob Ultra are both Anheuser-Busch products.

Is the point of this scene to show us that the characters aren’t as educated about their consumer decisions as they think they are? Are Billy Bob and his friends the butt of the joke? And wait, why would ABI endorse this scene?

But aside from those questions, the other thing that bothered me is it just doesn’t ring true. Wouldn’t they be more likely to be drinking Coors anyway? Apparently, based on my googling, Taylor Sheridan used to feature Coors heavily in Yellowstone. I guess he has a real penchant for product placement. So why pivot from that to Michelob Ultra? I could accept the idea that Billy Bob only drinks it because he thinks likes the light calories and low alcohol content, but the rest of his table too? It feels false.

Hopper once shouted: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

And it rang true. It told us about his character. But the updated version being “Bud Light? Fuck that shit! Michelob Ultra!” just seems like a bunch of phony product placement bullshit.

When I say I turned the show off because of this interaction, it’s not because if offended my politics. It’s because Taylor Sheridan and his product placers assumed I am of such little intelligence that I don’t realize Michelob Ultra and Bud Light have the same parent company.

The scene was so dumb that it made me wonder if Anheuser-Busch might’ve written the entire scene mocking Bud Light in an effort to create as much distance as possible between the two products and get naive, uneducated audiences to believe that Michelob Ultra and Bud Light are opposite entities. (The more I think about this, the more I think it’s true.)

Okay, so what does this have to do with Bud Light’s Wikipedia article?

After this scene led me to pause the show, I ended up googling some stuff. First, Michelob Ultra product placement. I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only one bothered by this.

Google’s search results for “michelob ultra product placement”.

Note that my search didn’t even include Landman and yet all three of the traditional listings and two of the People Also Ask questions mention it.

This was enough to validate me, but I was still wondering: why the Bud Light reference at all? Isn’t that a dated joke? That controversy began in April of 2023, while this episode first aired in December, 2024. Are those jokes still getting laughs? Are people still boycotting? Has the Bud Light brand rebounded yet?

So I googled “Bud Light” and was surprised by what I found:

Google’s results for “bud light”

In Position 1: the Bud Light website.

In Position 2: the “Bud Light boycott” Wikipedia article.

Useful, yes. But where was the Bud Light Wikipedia article? Was it being outranked by the Bud Light Wikipedia article? I scrolled down, looking for Bud Light’s Wikipedia article… and realized there wasn’t one, at least not in this Google SERP.

So I searched “bud light wikipedia” and found this SERP:

Google’s results for “bud light wikipedia”

Click the first result and it revealed what I expected: the “Bud Light” Wikipedia article is a redirect to the “Anheuser-Busch brands” article.

Weird, right? Is Bud Light not notable enough to receive its own article?

Or is it the standard practice to house beer brands under their parent company’s Wikipedia article?

Then I had to check the edit history, out of a suspicion that vandalism could be at the root of this situation.

Was there once a Bud Light Wikipedia article that, in the wake of the 2023 boycotts, was merged into the Anheuser-Busch article while the Bud Light boycott article took the rest?

Nope. I was wrong. Bud Light has never had a dedicated Wikipedia article.

Here is the first edit ever made on the Bud Light Wikipedia article, in April 2005, by an editor who was active at the time and has only made 2 edits in the last decade:

Yes, the first edit made to the Bud Light page was a redirect, sending it to Anheuser-Busch. Twenty years later, this edit remains in place.

BUT… it was pointed out to me in a reddit thread that I missed something. While “Bud Light” was first created as a redirect to Anheuser-Busch on 16 April 2005, an article for “Bud light” was created on 14 April 2005 (two days earlier), which appears to have triggered the creation and redirect of the Bud Light article to Anheuser-Busch. Here’s what the original article said:

Bud Light is a watered down beer. The commercials go “My name is BUUUUUUUUD LIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!”

You can see it here:

Thank you to redditor /u/kardeon for catching this.

Aside from the times when vandals have removed the redirect to create antics (something that has happened many times, especially in the wake of the boycott), there has never been a dedicated Bud Light article.

Look at the screenshot below to see all the examples of vandalism and reversions. It’s probably the most I’ve seen for a page that has only ever existed in redirect form.

Without knowing anything about the personal views of the editor who first implemented the redirect from Bud Light to Anheuser-Busch, one might label this an act of “deletionism.”

As defined by the Wikipedia article Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia:

Deletionist viewpoints are commonly motivated by a desire that Wikipedia be focused on and cover significant topics—along with the desire to place a firm cap upon proliferation of promotional use (seen as abuse of the website), trivia, and articles which are, in their opinion, of no general interest, lack suitable source material for high-quality coverage, are too short or otherwise unacceptably poor in quality,[2][3][4] or may cause maintenance overload to the community.

While I don’t see a clear argument for how the Bud Light article could be “of no general interest” and “lack suitable source material,” it does make sense that someone might assume that any Bud Light article would serve the purpose of “promotional use,” especially during the early oughts area, when Wikipedia was smaller than it is today. Then there is the relevance that vandalism originally prompted this—but it’s a history of vandalism, reversions, and redirecting, without anyone ever determining the need for “Bud Light” to have its own page.

But the argument that “Bud Light” is of no general interest and lacks suitable source material starts to fall apart when one considers some of the pages that do exist:

• Coors Light

• Natural Light

• Miller Lite

• Corona

• Heineken

• Budweiser

Those are six beer brands, are they not? And I know your argument right now: well, why would Bud Light need to have an article if Budweiser has one? Sure, I might be willing to accept that…if it weren’t for Coors Light and Miller Lite being in there—and if the Bud Light article redirected to Budweiser.

Which it doesn’t. It redirects to Anheuser-Busch.

There is no satisfying answer to this question.

This is not the moment when I reveal the sinister truth lurking in the edit history. I wish it was. But no, I have failed to come up with any explanation for why Bud Light doesn’t have a Wikipedia article other than Bud Light does not have a Wikipedia article.

But I do have a way of explaining this.

You may recall Wikigroaning, the concept I mentioned in United States v. Google LLC v. Crackle Barrel. It’s a concept that originated on Something Awful. Here’s a simple description from the article that first described it:

First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight.” Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah.

I don’t think there’s any great conspiracy at play here, other than the fact that Wikipedia editors don’t drink Bud Light and never have. It’s ultimately a problematic omission, as far as I’m concerned, especially considering the length and prominence of Bud Light boycott and the seeming double standard between Bud Light and many similar beers.

But no, Michelob Ultra doesn’t have a Wikipedia article either. Like Bud Light, it redirects to Anheuser-Busch.

One more update: Wikigroaning is a pretty dated concept at this point. I’m thinking a new name might be needed. I’m leaning toward Wikiskewing.

Now, go read my other writing on the topic of Wikigroaning: