With one quick search you’ll find that Google knows a lot about you. Type your name into Google Search and you may be surprised to see your old addresses, phone numbers, forgotten social media profiles, sketchy people-search listings, or other personal information you never realized was out there. Sometimes it’s just annoying, but other times it can be dangerous.
The good news is that it’s possible to remove some personal information from Google Search. The catch? Google can only remove certain kinds of results, and getting something removed from Search doesn’t necessarily delete it from the internet itself. However, even removing some of the data can still go a long way towards improving privacy.
In this guide, I’ll break down what Google will actually remove, what it won’t touch, and the steps that give you the best chance of cleaning up your search results.
Before you can remove anything from Google Search, you need to know what’s actually out there. The easiest way to start is by Googling yourself from the point of view of a stranger. Open an incognito or private browsing window first—this reduces any personalized results tied to your own account or search history—then start searching.
You can begin with the basics such as your full name in quotes (ex. “John Smith”), your name plus city or state, your phone number, your home address, and your current or old email addresses.
This will give you a good baseline of what’s out there about you. Tip: Make sure to also search Google Images as personal photos, social media profiles, and even screenshots of your info may appear there as well.
As you search, make note of what kinds of information appear and where they’re coming from. Not all search results are equally important, and not all of them can be removed through Google, so taking a second to organize here can save you time in the future.
I find it helpful to sort any results I find into a few broad categories: personal contact info, sensitive financial or identification information, social media and personal profiles, news articles and public records, and harassing or explicit content (if any).
Now that you’ve tracked down what data is out there, it’s time to see if Google will remove it from Search results. Understanding what Google will and won’t take down can be confusing though. Google does remove some personal information from Search results, but the company draws a pretty firm line around what qualifies.
In general, Google is far more likely to remove information that creates a real privacy or safety risk—especially anything tied to identity theft, financial fraud, harassment, or explicit abuse.
But information that’s considered public, newsworthy, or legally published online, Google usually won’t touch.
Let’s break it down to help you understand where that line is typically drawn.
Google has policies specifically designed to protect users from privacy and safety risks. If your search results include any of the following, there’s a decent chance you can get them removed from Google Search.
Basically, if the content in Google Search doesn’t meet any of the above criteria, it’s not a sure thing to be removed. Just because information about you online may be uncomfortable, embarrassing, or damaging doesn’t necessarily mean Google will remove it. Think of Google’s removal system as aimed at protecting privacy and safety rather than reputation management.
So let’s say you find your personal information in Google Search and think it may fit into one of the categories that Google is likely to remove, how do you go about requesting a removal?
Well, before I go any further I’d advise you to send a removal request to the original website first. Google doesn’t actually own or control the content that appears in its search results. It’s simply indexing webpages that exist elsewhere online. So even if Google removes a result, the original page may still remain live and accessible through a direct link or another search engine.
The ideal scenario would be to remove the content from the website itself first, then ask Google to update or remove that information from its search results.
Firstly, if the information appears on a site that you have control over such as a social media profile, personal account, or your own blog post, you should log in immediately and delete that information yourself.
If someone else controls the website, look for privacy or removal request links, typically under “Contact” or “About” pages. Alternatively, find a site’s support email address or contact information and contact them directly. For data broker sites, they often have opt-out pages that can be used to send a request.
Once the information disappears from the webpage itself, Google will usually remove it from Search automatically over time. But if you don’t want to wait, Google offers tools that can speed things up.
Google’s easiest privacy feature is called “Results about you.” It’s designed to help users find and remove search results containing personal information such as home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.
The tool can also proactively monitor Search results and notify you when new personal information appears online.
You can access it directly on the Google Results about you page, through your Google account, or by searching for “Google Results about you.”
After submitting a request, Google reviews the result and decides whether it violates the company’s personal information policies.
For more serious cases, Google has a broader personal content removal request system.
This is the tool you’ll use if search results expose information like ID numbers, bank account or credit card info, login credentials, medical records, and other highly sensitive personal information.
In order to submit a request for this type of removal, you’ll typically need to provide the webpage URL, screenshots of the content, and an explanation as to why the info is harmful. Just be aware that there are no guarantees that Google will agree to remove this info, each request is taken on a case-by-case basis.
Google also has a separate removal tool specifically for harmful content, including doxxing, harassment, non-consensual images, explicit AI-generated images, and illegal content involving minors.
Google may remove these results from Search under its harassment and abuse policies, especially when there’s a clear safety risk involved.
For explicit images or deepfakes, Google will sometimes attempt to remove both the image itself and related search results all in one go.
If you find this type of harmful content online, it’s extremely important that you meticulously document everything first before filing requests. Save screenshots, URLs, usernames, and timestamps in case the content disappears later.
Getting your personal information removed from Google is only half the battle. The harder part is keeping it from showing back up again a few months later.
That happens more often than people realize, especially because entities such as data broker websites constantly collect, update, and resell personal information from public records, marketing databases, social media profiles, and other online sources. Even if one listing disappears, another can quietly pop up somewhere else.
In order to mitigate this type of situation, it’s best to follow privacy best-practices such as being careful what you post publicly on your profiles and removing any personal data from these types of publicly-facing sources such as phone numbers, addresses, birthday, family member names and vacation plans.
Additionally, I recommend that you lock down your social media privacy settings so that only friends and family can see your information—assume that any profile information set as “public” could show up on Google Search.
Aside from those two simple fixes, the next step I’d recommend is to consider subscribing to a data removal service such as Incogni, DeleteMe, or Optery. Services such as these automate much of the opt-out process on data broker sites by submitting removal requests on your behalf and continuing to monitor for new listings over time.
They’re not magic “erase me from the internet” buttons—and they can’t remove things like news articles or government records—but for ordinary people trying to reduce how easily their personal information appears online, they can save a huge amount of time and effort. When I used Incogni during a recent review, it estimated that it saved me over 600 hours in data broker request form filings.
For many users, the biggest advantage of these data removal services isn’t just the initial cleanup. It’s the ongoing monitoring that helps keep your data from resurfacing later on.
Finally, I recommend setting up Google monitoring alerts via Google Alerts or through Google’s “Results about you” tool. You can set up alerts for anything, but in this situation it’s helpful to have them set for your full name, phone numbers, email address, and other personal data. These will act as an early warning system for things like new people-search listings on data broker sites, newly indexed addresses or phone numbers associated with you, and any potential public profiles about you that pop up.
Author: Sam Singleton
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
