How to Remove Personal Information From Google (2026 Guide)

You can remove personal information from Google in three ways: ask Google to delist results that expose your address, phone number, ID numbers, bank details or explicit images through the Results About You tool; get the page deleted at its source; and opt out of the data-broker sites that republish it. Google removes the result, not the page, so the source matters most.

This guide walks through each route in the order that saves the most time, shows what Google refuses and why, and explains what is left when a request comes back denied.

What Google will remove on request, and what it will not

Google does not remove a result because it is unflattering. It removes results that fall under a published policy, and the policy for personal information is narrow and specific. If your case fits one of the rows below, a request is free and usually decided within days. If it does not, skip ahead to the sections on the source, on outdated pages and on what to do after a refusal.

Information in the result	Google’s policy	Route	Typical time
Home address, phone number, email address	Removable as personal contact information	Results About You tool, or the personal information removal form	Hours to a few days
Government ID numbers, tax or Social Security numbers, images of ID documents	Removable	Personal information removal form	A few days
Bank account or credit card numbers, images of your signature	Removable	Personal information removal form	A few days
Medical records, confidential logins and passwords	Removable	Personal information removal form	A few days
Contact details published with threats or to invite harassment (doxxing)	Removable, treated with priority	Personal information removal form, doxxing option	A few days
Explicit or intimate images shared without consent, including fakes	Removable under a separate policy	Explicit imagery removal form	A few days
Images of anyone under 18	Removable on request by the minor, a parent or a guardian	Images of minors form	A few days
A page that was deleted or changed but still shows the old text in Google	Refreshable	Refresh Outdated Content tool	One to three days
News coverage, court and government records, professional information, reviews, opinions	Not removable under the personal information policy	Go to the source, a legal ground, or suppression	Weeks to months

Two limits apply to every row. Google only reviews the exact URLs you submit, so a request for one page does nothing about its copies. And Google weighs public interest: if the information sits inside news reporting, a government record or content about your professional conduct, the request is usually declined even when the detail itself is on the list.

Removal also comes in two strengths. With a full removal the page no longer appears in Google for any search. With a partial removal the page stops appearing for searches that include your name but can still show for other searches. Both are useful. Neither deletes the page.

How to use Results About You, step by step

Results About You is the fastest route for contact details. It is a free tool inside your Google Account that looks for results showing your phone number, home address or email address, lets you request removal in a few taps, and then keeps watching for new ones. Google is still extending it country by country, and it is meant for signed-in adults, so if you do not see it in your account, use the removal form described at the end of this section instead.

1. Open the tool. In the Google app, tap your profile picture and choose Results about you. On a computer, sign in and go to the Results about you page in My Activity.
2. Tell Google what to look for. Enter your full name, including a maiden name or a nickname you are known by, and the phone numbers, addresses and email addresses you want monitored. Google uses these only to find matches.
3. Turn on alerts. Choose email, push notifications or both. Google checks Search regularly and tells you when a new result contains your details.
4. Review the results it finds. Each match shows the page and which detail it exposes. Open anything you do not recognize before acting on it.
5. Request removal. Select the result, choose the reason (it shows my personal contact info is the usual one) and submit. You can do this from the tool or from the three dots beside any result in Search.
6. Track the status. Requests show as in progress, approved, denied or undone. Most are decided within hours. An approval may take a little longer to show up in live search results.

When the tool is not available to you, or the information is something other than contact details (an ID number, bank details, a signature, medical records), use the request form on Google’s help page Remove select personally identifiable information. It asks for the URLs of the pages, the search terms that surface them and, for images, the image URLs. Screenshots that show exactly where the information appears make approvals faster.

Expect some denials. The common reasons are that the detail appears on a government or news site, that it is a business address or business phone rather than a private one, or that the page no longer shows the information and only needs a refresh. Each denial comes with its reason, which tells you which of the next sections applies.

How to remove yourself from Google search when the page is still live: going to the source

Google is an index. When a page is deleted or edited at its source, the result disappears or updates on its own, for every search engine and every AI assistant at once. That is why the source is worth the effort even when Google would approve a removal: a delisting hides the page from Google alone.

Work through the pages in this order.

Pages you control

Old social profiles, forum accounts, personal sites, portfolio pages, public wish lists, event pages, a forgotten blog. Log in and delete them or strip the personal details. If you have lost access, every major platform has an account recovery route and a separate form for reporting an account that exposes your information. People are often surprised by how much of their own first page they created themselves years ago.

Pages run by someone you can ask

An employer’s staff page, a club roster, a school or alumni page, a conference speaker list, a local newspaper’s notice of a house sale. Write to the site owner or the editor, not to a general inbox if you can avoid it. Keep the message short: the URL, the exact detail you want removed, and the reason (safety, harassment, identity theft). Ask for an edit before you ask for a deletion. Removing a street address from a page is an easy yes. Deleting the page is a harder one. Most legitimate sites answer within a week or two.

Pages that will not cooperate

If the content is a news article, the routes are different and we cover them in our guide on how to remove a news article from Google. If it is a review that reveals personal details, platforms remove that kind of content under their own rules, and the process is in our Google review removal guide. If it is a forum or a gossip site, check its terms for a privacy or harassment clause and report the post under that clause, which works more often than an angry email does.

Once a page is edited or gone, do not wait for Google to notice. Use the refresh tool described two sections below.

Data brokers and people-search sites: the opt-out round

For most people in the United States, the results that expose an address and phone number come from people-search sites and data brokers. They buy and scrape public records, marketing lists and old account data, build a profile page per person, and rank for full-name searches. Removing one profile helps little, because the same record sits with dozens of companies and they resell to each other.

One request is never enough. Plan it as a round.

1. List them. Search your full name plus your city, then your name plus your phone number, in a private window. Write down every people-search result on the first three pages.
2. Opt out at each one. Every legitimate broker has an opt-out or suppression page, usually linked in the footer under privacy or do not sell my information. Most ask you to find your own listing, paste its URL and confirm by email. A few ask for ID. If one does, cover everything except your name and address.
3. Use a separate email address. You are handing contact details to companies whose business is contact details. A dedicated address keeps your main inbox out of the next dataset.
4. Use your state or national rights where they exist. Residents of states with privacy laws can demand deletion, not just suppression, and residents of the EU and the UK have erasure rights under data protection law. Mention the law in your request. It shortens the conversation.
5. Refresh and repeat. After a listing is gone, submit its URL to Google’s refresh tool. Then put a reminder in your calendar, because profiles tend to reappear within six to twelve months as brokers buy new data.

Results About You complements this round well. The brokers remove the record at the source, and the tool catches the ones that come back.

Outdated results: the Refresh Outdated Content tool

A deleted or edited page can keep showing its old title and snippet in Google for weeks, sometimes with the exact detail you had removed. The Refresh Outdated Content tool fixes that. You paste the URL. If the page is gone, Google drops the result. If the page still exists but the text has changed, you enter a word that used to be on the page and no longer is, and Google refreshes the snippet and its cached copy.

Two conditions apply. The change has to be real, because Google re-crawls the page to confirm it. And the tool only works on pages, images and snippets that have already changed at the source. It cannot be used to remove something that is still live.

This is the step people skip most often. An approved edit at the source that still shows the old snippet in Google looks like a failure when it is only a delay that you can clear yourself in a day or two.

When Google says no: legal grounds, suppression and what each costs

A refusal means the content does not fit a removal policy. It says nothing about whether the result can be dealt with. Three routes remain.

Legal grounds

Google removes results when the law requires it. In the EU and the UK, individuals can ask for results about them to be delisted when the information is inaccurate, irrelevant or out of date and there is no strong public interest in it. In the United States there is no equivalent right, but Google acts on court orders that declare content defamatory or unlawful, on copyright claims when someone has published your photos or writing without permission, and on reports of content that is illegal in itself. A lawyer’s letter to the publisher sometimes resolves the matter before any of that is needed. Be careful with threats, though. A heavy-handed demand can turn a forgotten page into a story about the demand, a pattern we document in our post on the Streisand effect.

Suppression

When a result is lawful and the publisher will not change it, the remaining route is to outrank it. Suppression means building and strengthening pages about you that deserve to rank above it: complete professional profiles, a personal site, interviews, published work. Done properly it moves the unwanted result off the first page for searches of your name, which is where nearly all the attention goes. It is slower than removal, typically three to twelve months, and it does not suit every case. Our guide on how to remove unwanted Google search results has the full decision table for choosing between the routes.

What each route costs

Everything in the first five sections of this guide is free if you do it yourself, and most people can. Paid monitoring and opt-out services cost roughly what a streaming subscription costs and are worth it if your details keep coming back.

Professional work starts where the forms stop. Our published brackets are monthly: $1,000 to $3,000 a month for a light cleanup (a handful of results, cooperative sources, opt-outs handled for you, usually three to six months), $3,000 to $10,000 a month for a standard suppression program where a result cannot be removed, and $10,000 a month and up for regulated or high-profile cases where legal work, press and search all have to move together. The reasoning behind those numbers is in our guide to what online reputation management costs.

Removing personal information as part of Buzz Dealer’s personal ORM

Most of the people who come to us have already tried the forms. Some were refused. Others were approved and then watched the same details come back on a different site a month later. What they need is the whole round done once, in the right order, and then kept that way.

In a personal reputation management engagement, personal information removal is the first phase. We map every result for the name and its variants across Google, Bing and the AI assistants that now summarize a person in a paragraph. We sort the results by route: removable by policy, removable at the source, removable on legal grounds, or not removable. We file and follow up the requests, handle the broker round, and refresh what has changed. What cannot be removed goes into a suppression plan with a realistic timeline. Then we keep monitoring, because new listings and new copies are a matter of when.

We have done this work since 2008. We do not promise that a specific result will disappear, because nobody who is honest can, and we tell you at the start which results we expect to move and which we do not.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I remove personal information from Google?

Start with the source: delete or edit the pages you control and ask other site owners to remove the detail. For results that expose your address, phone number, email, ID or bank details, file a removal request through Results About You or Google’s personal information form. Then opt out of the data brokers that republish your record and refresh the results that have changed.

How do I remove my name from Google search?

You cannot remove a name as such, because Google does not delist a person. You can remove or change individual results. Delete old profiles you own, ask site owners to edit pages that mention you, use your legal rights where they exist, and outrank what remains with accurate pages of your own. The name stays searchable. What people find changes.

Can I remove my phone number and address from Google?

Yes. Private contact details are the clearest case in Google’s removal policy. Use Results About You in your Google Account, or the three dots beside a result, and choose the option that says the result shows your personal contact info. Most requests are decided within hours. Business addresses, and details inside news or government records, are usually refused.

What is Google’s Results About You tool?

It is a free feature of your Google Account that searches Google for results containing your phone number, home address or email address, lets you request their removal, and alerts you when new ones appear. It works for signed-in adults in the countries where Google has launched it. It hides results from Google Search. It does not delete the pages.

Does removing a result from Google delete it from the internet?

No. A removal only stops the page from appearing in Google Search, sometimes only for searches that include your name. The page stays online, stays reachable by direct link and can still appear in other search engines and in AI assistants. To make the information disappear everywhere, it has to be edited or deleted on the site that publishes it.

How much does it cost to have personal information removed?

Google’s tools and broker opt-outs are free if you do the work yourself. Subscription services that repeat the opt-outs cost a modest monthly fee. Professional help follows our published monthly brackets: $1,000 to $3,000 a month for a light cleanup, $3,000 to $10,000 a month for a standard suppression program, and $10,000 a month and up for regulated or high-profile cases.

If the information keeps coming back or Google has refused, tell us what is showing and where, and we will tell you which route is realistic.