Google Processed Over 1 Billion DMCA Takedowns Last Year - Here's What They're Really Being Used For

Torrentfreak recently reported that Google had processed over 1,000,000,000 DMCA requests in the past 12 months. This data was taken from the Google Transparency Report, where the organization details request volume, outcome, and a variety of other metrics and activities.

In compliance with The Digital Millennium Copyright act, Google allows copyright holders to issue takedown requests for infringing content, which upon successful review, result in a delisting of the content from Google search.

The process, from Google:

To initiate the process to delist content from Search results, a copyright owner who believes a URL points to infringing content sends us a takedown notice for that allegedly infringing material. When we receive a valid takedown notice, our teams carefully review it for completeness and check for other problems. If the notice is complete and we find no other issues, we delist the URL from Search results.

To be sure, one such use of this process is to remove genuinely infringing content, such as links to pirated movies, music, or games. The other is for reputation management and search engine optimization.

Combing through the requests that Google shares I found a handful of these types of requests very quickly.

These highlight reputation management schemes:

A business posted content from its own website into the comments on a negative review of their business. The business owner then filed a copyright complaint against the review page citing this content in the comments.

A Ukrainian politician sent us a copyright complaint regarding the use of his image in a number of articles critical of his performance in office.

A business filed a copyright complaint regarding the use of images of its products in a TechDirt article discussing that business’s attempt to make Google delist a number of pages.

This highlights an SEO tactic:

An individual claiming to represent a news site filed a copyright complaint against a second, reputable news site for use of their article. After further investigation, Google determined that the individual’s site had been created and then back-dated for the purpose of filing this takedown request.

There is also incompetence aplenty:

An anti-piracy enforcement firm representing a film studio filed a copyright complaint identifying dozens of Github URLs to delist, presumably because each URL contained the name of a movie produced by the studio. However, the content at the Github URLs did not contain any allegedly infringing content.

An anti-piracy enforcement firm representing a music label filed a copyright complaint asking us to delist dozens of homepages containing the word “coffee” in the title. These URLs had nothing to do with the identified copyrighted work.

The sheer volume of DMCA requests - a billion in a year - represents an invisible force constantly reshaping what users can and cannot find through search. While legitimate copyright protection serves a purpose, this system has evolved far beyond its original intent. Bad actors exploit it for reputation management, competitors weaponize it for SEO advantage, and automated systems carpet-bomb URLs containing innocent phrases like "coffee." The result is a kind of digital erosion, where the landscape of searchable content is continuously altered not just by what is added, but by what is strategically removed.

This matters because search engines are the primary gateway to information online. What began as a tool to protect copyright holders has evolved into a sophisticated system for managing online visibility - one that operates largely outside of public view and understanding - operating at an astounding pace. The real cost isn't just in what's removed, but in the erosion of trust in our ability to find unfiltered, un-manipulated information online.