Feb 18, 2025 12:20:00

Google will process 3.5 billion pages for copyright issues in 2024, 14,000 times more than 15 years ago

Google is working to prevent content that may infringe copyrights from appearing in its search results, and accepts requests for removal under

the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) . It has been revealed that the number of requests for removal reached 3.5 billion in 2024 alone. The cumulative number of requests has also exceeded 11.5 billion.

Content Excluded Due to Copyright Issues – Google Transparency Report
https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview

Google's Piracy Purge: 3.5 Billion DMCA Takedown Notices in a Year * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/googles-piracy-purge-3-5-billion-dmca-takedown-notices-in-a-year-250215/

According to information on removal requests published by Google as part of its Transparency Report, the total number of requests at the time of writing was 11,578,990,370. In addition, the number of domains designated for removal was 5,519,266, the number of copyright holders who requested removal was 660,439, and the number of organizations that requested removal at the request of copyright holders was 724,948.

Below is a graph showing the trend in the number of deletion requests processed by Google from 2012 to 2025, compiled by

TorrentFreak, a news site that deals with copyright-related matters. The number of deletion requests was about 250,000 per year around 2015, but by 2024 it had increased 14,000 times to 3.5 billion.

Many of the removal requests are submitted by organizations requested by copyright holders. Among them, '

Link Busters ' sent out 2,513,444,854 requests, which is about a quarter of the total.

Below is a graph showing the trend in the number of Link Busters applications. The number of applications has been increasing sharply since the latter half of 2023.

The top six domains that were the subject of removal requests are as follows. Anna's Archive , which publishes pirated content, operates across multiple domains, with three of the top six being Anna's Archive domains.

According to TorrentFreak, websites dealing in pirated content are experiencing a cat-and-mouse game in which they are removed from Google search results, then acquire another domain, which is then removed, and then acquire another domain... This has led to a sharp increase in the number of removal requests.