This is the first question almost everyone asks us, and it deserves a straight answer. Yes, some negative search results can be removed, and every year Google takes down millions of pages because someone asked it to.

But the pages that come down are a narrow and specific group, and a news story about your work is usually outside it.

So it helps to know which results can be removed and which ones can only be pushed down before you spend money on the wrong approach.

The three doors into Google

Google runs three separate paths for removal requests, and each one handles a different kind of problem, so it helps to know which door you are knocking on.

The first door is for personal information. Google will remove pages that show your home address, phone number, bank details, ID numbers or medical records, and since February 2026 it also removes intimate images posted without consent, as the Reputation Resolutions guide to Google removals sets out.

Requests through this door usually get a decision within days to a few weeks, and the success rate is high because the rules are clear and the harm is obvious.

The second door is legal. Google will remove content that breaks the law in your country, meaning defamation backed by a court order, copyright or trademark violations, or harassment that includes threats.

This door works, but it works slowly and it asks for paperwork, since Google wants to see a court ruling before it takes down something that is legal to publish. A false accusation with no ruling behind it usually stays up until a court says otherwise.

The third door is for outdated content. If the page that ranked for your name has since been deleted or changed, you can ask Google to refresh its copy, and within a few days the dead listing disappears or the preview text updates.

This door fixes a surprising number of problems, because a lot of old results are pages the publisher already took down and Google simply has not noticed yet.

What the European numbers show

Europe gives us the clearest data on how removal works in practice, since the right to be forgotten has let people in the EU ask Google to delist pages about themselves since 2014.

A study by Surfshark looked at a single year of those requests and found that Google received around 147,000 of them covering roughly 600,000 web addresses, and it delisted about 56% of the addresses people asked about.

That headline number hides the part that matters.

In other words, the closer a page sits to your professional conduct, the less likely Google is to take it down, and the pages that damage a founder or an executive are almost always about professional conduct.

Google's own guidance on these requests says it applies a stricter standard to business leaders and public figures, gives strong weight to journalism, and treats recent news as having a high public interest.

It also confirms that even a successful delisting applies only to European versions of Google, so a page removed in Paris still shows up for someone searching from New York.

Why the worst results are the hardest to remove

Put those rules together and a pattern appears. The results that people most want gone tend to be news articles about something that happened at work, and news articles about professional conduct are the category Google protects most carefully.

A story in a recognized outlet about a lawsuit, a failed venture or a dispute with a former partner is exactly the kind of page that Google's policies were written to keep, because a future business partner has a reasonable interest in knowing about it.

Reviews sit in a similar place for a different reason. Google only points to them, so the decision to keep or remove a review belongs to the platform, and platforms protect negative reviews as a matter of policy.

Trustpilot is the clearest example, because its whole business rests on the idea that companies have no power to delete reviews they dislike, so it will only act on a review that breaks a specific rule, such as spam or a clear conflict of interest, and even then the process takes weeks and often ends with the review staying up.

That said, strict rules are still rules, and a review that breaks one can come down if the case is built properly, which is where our work usually starts: we check each review against the platform's own guidelines and file the request in the form the moderators accept, so that a review with a real flaw in it gets judged on that flaw.

When a review breaks no rule at all, or when the platform refuses to act, we have other methods, and they depend on the case, from working with the platform on verification and context to legal routes where the content crosses a line, and to building enough strong and current material around the name that a single review stops defining it.

The same goes for forum threads and social media posts, where the site sets the rules and Google has no vote.

There is one more layer that people underestimate, and it is what AI assistants do with old stories.

An AI builds its answer from whatever material exists about you across the web, so a story that Google has delisted in Europe can still shape what ChatGPT says, because the model reads the page directly or reads the many other pages that repeated it.

Removal from a search index and removal from the AI's picture of you are two different things, and only the second one changes what a stranger hears when they ask an assistant who you are.

How much power a story keeps

Once you accept that the damaging article will probably stay online, the question becomes how much power it keeps, and the answer is that power depends almost entirely on what surrounds it.

A single hard story at the top of an otherwise empty first page defines you. The same story sitting in position eight under a profile and two interviews and a piece of expert commentary becomes a footnote that the reader weighs against everything else.

This is the work most of our cases turn into. We do pursue removal wherever a real path exists, and we take the outdated content route and the personal information route and the legal route when the facts support them.

But the larger part of the effort goes into building new coverage that outranks the old, and that part follows a timeline that people need to understand up front.

Removal, when it works, takes days or weeks. Pushing a story down takes months, because Google needs to see several stronger and more recent pages settle into place before it moves an older result off the first page, and AI systems need time to find those pages and start using them.

At the end of that process the story still exists, and anyone who searches for it by name can find it, but it has dropped off the first page and stopped being the first thing a stranger learns about you. For most people that is the outcome they needed all along.

Where a false story is different

Everything above assumes the story is unflattering but true, since that is the common case. When a story is false, the path changes, and it is worth taking the harder road.

A formal correction request to the publisher comes first, because editors will fix a clear factual error more often than people expect, and a corrected page removes the problem at the source rather than only from the index.

If the publisher refuses and the claim is plainly false and damaging, a defamation ruling opens Google's legal door, though that takes time and money and a lawyer who knows the local rules.

While that runs, the same coverage work applies, because a court case can take a year and you still have meetings next month. A strong, verified record around a false story also does something the court cannot, which is that it gives the reader and the AI a reason to doubt the claim on their own.

Where to start

If you are staring at a result you want gone, the first step is to sort it into one of the groups above.

We are glad to look at your specific result and tell you which group it falls into and what a realistic plan looks like. Send us the link and a few lines about where you are heading, and a strategist will come back within 48 hours with a straight answer about what can be removed, what can be pushed down, and how long each part takes.

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