How to remove your personal information from Google

Getting something out of Google is two separate jobs, and almost everyone attempts only one of them. Google is an index — it is showing you a page that exists on somebody else server. Removing the result hides it from search; removing the page is what actually makes it gone. This guide covers both, the five different request routes Google operates, which ones your situation qualifies for, and the categories it will refuse.

Google does not have your data

When your phone number shows up in a Google result, Google did not collect it. A people-search site published it, and Google indexed that page. That distinction decides your entire strategy:

• —Remove the page at the source and the result disappears permanently, once Google re-crawls. This is the real fix and the only one that also removes you from Bing, DuckDuckGo and every scraper.
• —Remove the result from Google and the page stays live for anyone with the link, every other search engine, and the next scraper. Still worth doing, because Google is how people will actually find it.

Do them in that order where you can. Where you cannot get the page taken down — a broker that ignores you, a site with no contact address — the Google-side routes below are what you have.

Step one: find out what is actually there

Route 1: Results About You

Google runs a dedicated tool for exactly this, and it is the right first stop. It finds results containing your contact details and lets you request their removal from search, then keeps monitoring for new ones.

• —Go to myactivity.google.com/results-about-you, or open the Google app and find "Results about you" in your profile menu.
• —Enter the name, address, phone number and email you want monitored. Google then surfaces matching results and you request removal per result.
• —It covers your contact information appearing in results. It is not a general-purpose "remove this page about me" button.
• —Availability and language coverage have expanded over time but are not universal — if you do not see it, use the routes below.

Route 2: the personal information removal policy

Separately, Google will remove results outright for a defined list of content types, regardless of whether the page comes down. This is a policy decision rather than a legal one, and it applies worldwide. The qualifying categories are specific:

• —Government identification numbers — national insurance, social security, tax ID, passport number.
• —Bank account and credit card numbers.
• —Images of handwritten signatures and of identification documents.
• —Confidential medical records.
• —Personal contact information — address, phone number, email — where it appears with an element of doxxing, meaning malicious intent or an explicit or implied threat.
• —Non-consensual intimate imagery, and fake or synthetic explicit imagery depicting you.
• —Explicit content you uploaded or consented to that has since been published on a site with a pay-for-removal practice.
• —Content on sites with exploitative removal practices, where the site charges to take things down.

Start at the Google removal request troubleshooter, which routes you to the correct form once you describe the content. Submit one request per URL, and include the exact URL plus a screenshot or the specific text showing the information on the page.

Route 3: remove the page at the source

The permanent fix, and the only one that works across every search engine. Which door you knock on depends on who owns the page:

• —It is your account. Delete the profile or the post. Our per-platform deletion guides have the exact page and steps for 100 services.
• —It is a people-search or data broker site. Each has its own opt-out form, and the data broker opt-out list walks through the major ones. Expect them to repopulate.
• —It is someone else site. Email the owner or the address in the privacy policy. Be short, specific and polite: name the URL, name the information, ask for its removal. In the UK, EEA or California, cite your erasure right — it changes which queue the message lands in.
• —There is no contact address. Run a Whois lookup on the domain, and try the registrar abuse contact or the hosting provider. A hosting abuse report is sometimes the only lever that works.

Route 4: outdated content removal

When you have already got the page deleted or edited, but Google is still showing the old version, this is the tool that speeds up the index catching up.

Use Remove Outdated Content. You do not need to own the site. Google verifies that the live page no longer contains what its index claims, then drops the stale result and the snippet. Requests are usually processed in days.

Route 5: the right to be forgotten (UK and EU)

If you are in the UK or the EEA, you have a legal right to request that search engines delist pages about you from results for your name, established by the 2014 Google Spain ruling and now part of data protection law.

• —Submit it through the personal data removal request form. Bing and DuckDuckGo have equivalents; file separately.
• —Explain for each URL why the information is inadequate, irrelevant or excessive — being embarrassed is not the test. Spent convictions, long-ago financial difficulty and information about you as a private individual are the strongest cases.
• —Google weighs your privacy against the public interest, and refuses where the public interest wins — which it generally does for anything about your current professional conduct or public role.
• —A delisting applies to name queries, and the page remains live and findable by other searches. If refused, you can escalate to your data protection authority, such as the ICO in the UK.

What Google will not remove

• —Accurate journalism. Established reporting stays. The UK and EU delisting route is the only partial exception, and it is weighed against public interest.
• —Public records. Court filings, property deeds, business registrations and professional licences are published by design.
• —Content that is merely unflattering. A bad review, a critical blog post, an old forum argument. Not a removal category, though the site owner may oblige you.
• —Your own old posts, by request. Delete them at the source; Google will not do it on your behalf.
• —Contact details with no doxxing element. A phone number in an ordinary business listing does not qualify under the policy route, though Results About You may still help.

Stopping it coming back

Removal is not a one-time event, for two structural reasons. People-search sites rebuild their profiles from public records that never went anywhere, so a successful opt-out today often reappears within months. And Google re-crawls continuously, so a page that returns gets re-indexed automatically.

• —Leave Results About You monitoring switched on — it is the only part of this that is genuinely automatic.
• —Set a calendar reminder to re-run your name searches every three to six months.
• —Keep a record of every opt-out you submitted, with the date and any reference number. Re-submitting is much faster when you already know which sites to check.
• —Reduce what gets published in the first place: tighten the public view of accounts you keep, and stop using your real full name and city where a handle would do.

What Tracebase does and does not do here

Being direct: Tracebase does not scan Google. We check platforms for accounts matching your email addresses and usernames, and we check your verified addresses against the public breach corpus. We do not search by name, which is exactly what search results and people-search profiles are keyed on, so nothing we do finds a broker listing for you.

Where we help is the first group in your audit list: the pages that exist because you have an account somewhere. Finding those accounts — including the ones you no longer remember — is the part you cannot easily do by hand, and deleting them at the source is what removes the result permanently rather than suppressing it. The broker side of the problem is manual work, and the opt-out list is the honest answer to it.