Transparency Report

Government requests to remove content

Courts and government agencies around the world regularly request that we remove information from Google products. We review these requests closely to determine if content should be removed because it violates a law or our product policies. In this report, we disclose the number of requests we receive in six-month periods.

Government removal requests by the numbers:

Governments contact Google with content removal requests for a number of reasons. Government bodies may claim that content violates a local law, and include court orders that are often not directed at Google with their requests. Both types of requests are counted in this report. We also include government requests to review content to determine if it violates our own product community guidelines and content policies.

Total removal requests received since 2011
Total items named for removal since 2011

* 2009 - 2010 data is available in the CSV download file

Requests:

Data in this chart dates back to 2011, when we began recording and reporting this information.

We did not begin providing branch or reason data until the December 2010 reporting period.

Items:

Total items requested for removal from each Google product or service.

We did not begin providing item counts until the June 2010 reporting period.

Removal percentages:

There are many reasons we may not have removed content in response to a request, for instance, some requests may not be specific enough for us to know what the government wanted us to remove (for example, no URL is listed in the request) or the content might have already been removed by the author. Note that not all court orders included with requests directly compel Google to take action.

Items broken down by decision taken in requests involving a court order or originating from various government agencies. Prior to 2019, we published removal percentages based on action taken on requests and not items. From 2019 onwards, we publish removal percentages based on action taken per item.

Reasons for removal:

Our teams evaluate each request and assign a category based on the reasons for removal provided by the government agency or court order. Note that prior to the January–June 2011 reporting period, we were not tracking the reasons for removal requests at a very granular level. As a result of this, many requests were classified as "Other" instead of something more specific.

Breakdown of all of the requests we received during the reporting period.

Explore requests

Each reporting period, we highlight requests that may be of public interest. These requests provide a glimpse at the wide range of content removal requests that we receive, but they are not comprehensive.

Government requests to remove content

We share this information to shed light on the scale and scope of government requests for content removals. We hope to draw attention to the laws and legal processes around the world that affect access to information online. Share this page on social media to bring more attention to these laws.

Download report data

Learn more about how government requests impact the flow of information online