As part of a regular evaluation of threats to the water quality and ecological health of the Laurentian Great Lakes, assessment reports for a variety of indicators have been released every few years starting in 2009. The groundwater quality indicator, initiated in 2017, “attempts to evaluate the general status of the quality of shallow groundwater in the Great Lakes Basin, which is interactive with other components of the water cycle and has potential to impact the quality of the Great Lakes waters”. It has used available data of nitrate and chloride concentrations from monitoring wells, limited to < 40 m deep, largely from provincial/state monitoring programs. These data are compared to aquatic life guideline values and then are combined at the watershed-scale to derive a groundwater quality ranking of good, fair, or poor (or undetermined for limited data); which then are evaluated together to derive analogous rankings for each of the five lake Great Lake basins and, subsequently, the entire Great Lakes basin. While logically developed based on perceived available data sources, the current approach may not represent the actual impact from groundwater pollutants on these receiving waters and suffers from limited spatial and temporal data. In this presentation, several problems with the current approach will be outlined and some ideas for improvement will be shared, with the intent of initiating discussion that will hopefully help build toward a new or modified Great Lakes groundwater quality indicator.