How to Remove Your Personal Information From Google Search

Looking for more privacy? Here's how to remove your phone number, email, physical address, and lots of other personal data about yourself from Google's search results.

Personally identifiable information (PII) isn't sacred to search engines—or at least, it hasn't been. Over the years, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have accepted that many people simply don't want to be found in a search. Some newer laws have helped nudge companies in that direction. Sometimes, users overwhelmingly demanded better privacy tools. So Google began to relent(Opens in a new window). It never hurts to appear more privacy-oriented than the competition—which isn't hard to do when you're up against Facebook(Opens in a new window).

Recently, Google added to its privacy repertoire by letting you submit a request to delete your addresses (both physical and email) and phone numbers from potential search results. You can request this without even having to prove that the data floating out there is a problem (with some exceptions), which is a big step for the search engine.  

The PII mentioned above has been added to the already-existing ability to limit exposure on Google results of the following:

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• National ID numbers

• Bank accounts

• Credit card numbers

• Personal signatures

• Login info and credentials

• Medical records

• "Irrelevant pornography" (that is, explicit material somehow tied to your name)

• Deepfake porn you may appear in against your will.

If you're afraid of getting doxxed(Opens in a new window), Google may even remove your professional contact info.

That’s all great news, but how exactly do you get Google to take down the offending

 PII?

Eventually, you'll be able to do it within the Google app. Picture doing a search on your phone number, seeing it appear in results, and being able to click the three-dot menu next to the result to ask that it be deleted. Google says this will happen within the next few months. Before then, you've got to do a little bit more work.

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Manual Requests

The first stop is this Google Search Help page(Opens in a new window), which has a rundown of the options above but also shows the direct link to this form: Request to remove your personal information on Google(Opens in a new window).

The options are either to remove information that appears in search results or to prevent information from showing up in searches altogether. If you want the latter, and you own the website with the information you don't want showing, Google spells out how to block a URL or specific site pages from Google search results. It involves robots.txt files(Opens in a new window), meta tags(Opens in a new window), and password-protecting page files(Opens in a new window).