Start with the free routes
If something unwelcome is showing in Google for your name, there are official routes that cost nothing, and one of them may fix the problem outright. They are worth trying before you pay anybody, including us. What follows is what each route covers, and, just as usefully, where each one stops.
One thing to hold on to throughout. Google is an index of other people's websites. Taking a result out of Google does not take the page off the internet. Google says so on its own help pages: when a result is removed from Search the information still exists on the source web page, and people may still reach it through a shared link, a social post or a different search engine. If you want the page itself gone, you have to ask whoever publishes it, or show Google a court order.
Every tool below is linked to its own official page. Open the link rather than a search result: removal forms are a favourite target for imitation sites.
Results about you: phone, email and home address
This is a tool inside your Google account that finds search results carrying your personal contact details and lets you ask for them to be taken out of Search. Google names what it covers: your phone number, your home address and your email address.
- You need to be signed in to a Google account to use it.
- Google says that with notifications turned on you are told when results matching your details are found, and told again when new ones appear later.
- It does not cover professional information posted with the intent to harm. Google points you to its fuller removal request for that, which is the next section.
- Google says it will not remove results for pages owned by educational or government institutions, or for newspapers, on the basis that the information is valuable to the public.
- Google describes some of these features as rolling out to people over 18 in certain markets, so what you see may differ from what is described.
Google's page: support.google.com/websearch/answer/12719076.
The personal information request
Behind that tool is a longer list of things Google says it may take out of Search. Its policy page names your address, phone number or email; government identification numbers; bank account and credit card numbers; images of a handwritten signature or an identity document; medical records; and confidential usernames and passwords. It also covers doxxing: personal details published alongside threats or calls to harass you, or personal details gathered together with no legitimate purpose.
Intimate images shared without your consent are a different matter, with their own routes and their own urgency, and they are not something to work through alone from a help page. Our page on intimate images sets out the first step and what we do from there.
Google also says that where the content is newsworthy it may decline. That is worth knowing before you file, because a refusal on those grounds is not a mistake you can argue your way out of.
Google's page: support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673730.
Refresh outdated content
This is the narrowest tool on the list and the most misunderstood. It exists for one situation: the page has been deleted, or its content has changed, and Google is still showing the old version, the old description or an old image.
It does not remove a live page. Google is plain about it: if you have already updated a live page you do not need the form at all, and the tool is for content that was deleted from a site but still comes up in results. There is a version for web pages and a version for images.
So the order matters. Get the page changed or taken down first, by asking whoever runs it, then use this tool to ask Google to catch up. Used the other way round it does nothing, and the time you spend on it is time the page is still sitting there.
The tool: search.google.com/search-console/remove-outdated-content. Google's page about it: support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986.
The legal removal request
Separately from the policy routes above, Google runs a legal removal process. Its troubleshooter asks you to choose a reason, and the reasons it lists include a court order about content a court has found unlawful, defamation, copyright, trademark, counterfeit goods, circumvention, a counter notice, and an other option for laws not named, such as anti-terrorism or hate speech laws.
Two things are worth knowing before you start it.
- It is a legal process and it expects legal material. A court order, or a complaint framed properly. This is the route where a lawyer earns their fee, and the one where a do-it-yourself attempt is most likely to come back refused.
- Google's wording about scope applies here too: it can restrict access to content that appears in Google products and services, but that content may still exist elsewhere on the web.
If a court has already made an order about the content, this is where the order goes. If you believe something is defamatory and no court has said so yet, that is a conversation with a lawyer, and it is not one to leave for a few months: defamation time limits in Australia are short. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
Google's form: support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905.
The eSafety Commissioner
For serious online abuse, Australia has something a lot of countries do not: a regulator with power under the Online Safety Act to require an online service or platform to take material down. It covers intimate images shared or threatened without consent, and serious abuse aimed at a person. It is free, it is confidential, and it has legal force behind it, which is why it comes before anything anyone charges for. If you are in immediate danger, call 000.
Reports go through eSafety's own form: esafety.gov.au/report.
That report is the first step, not the whole job. Everything after it, every copy, every platform's own process, every request and every answer, and what search still shows for your name, is the work our intimate images and harassment pages describe.
Asking the publisher
Everything above works on the index. The page itself belongs to whoever published it, and sometimes the shortest route is to ask them. Each kind of site has its own process.
- News sites. Most Australian mastheads have a corrections process, and separately an editorial or legal address for complaints. A short, specific, factual note about what is wrong reads very differently from an angry one, and it is the only kind worth sending. Some publishers will correct an article or add the outcome of a matter. Many will not, and they are within their rights.
- Forums and community sites. They have rules, and a post that breaks one can be reported. Report once, quoting the rule you think it breaks, and then leave it alone. Arguing in the thread keeps it alive.
- Review platforms. Each has a process for reviews that break its own policies, for example a review from someone who was never a customer. It is a policy question rather than a legal one, and the platform decides.
If the page is false and damaging, a defamation claim may be open to you. In Australia the first formal step is a concerns notice, and that is a lawyer's document rather than an email to write yourself. The time limits are short, so see a lawyer early rather than late.
What none of these will do
Be honest with yourself about which kind of problem you have, because it decides everything that follows.
None of the routes on this page will take down an accurate news article. None of them will take down a court or tribunal decision that was published properly. None of them will take down a truthful review, however unfair it feels to you. Those pages are lawful, they belong to someone else, and there is no form that makes them go away. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or about to do something in your name that you would not want done.
That is the situation suppression exists for. The page stays where it is, and the aim is that it is no longer the first thing a person sees when they search your name. It is a different thing from removal, it is not free, and it is worth understanding properly before you spend anything on it.
Read next. If you are not sure which of the two your problem is, suppression or removal walks through it in four questions. If you found this today and have not done anything yet, the first 24 hours is the order to do things in.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. For what we do and do not do, see how it works.