What is Google's Results About You tool?

Personal contact info, and what else the tool removes

The covered list is specific and worth reading before you file anything.

• Your phone number, home address, or email address
• Government identification numbers
• Bank account or credit card numbers
• Images of handwritten signatures and of identity documents
• Confidential login credentials
• Personal medical records

There is also a separate track for results shared with an intent to harm, which is Google's language for doxxing. That track carries a broader removal than the ordinary contact information request, because the harm being addressed is different.

That definition is the whole shape of the tool. Someone with the direct link still reaches the page. Another search engine still returns it. The site still holds the data and can still sell it.

What the Google removal tool does not cover

You are looking at	Covered here	The actual route
A people search profile with your home address	Yes	This tool, plus a broker opt-out at the source
A negative review of your business	No	The platform's review policy
A news article about you	No	The publisher, or suppression
A Reddit thread using your name	No	Subreddit moderators or Reddit's content policy
A false statement of fact about you	No	Defamation analysis, with counsel
Your own old website you no longer control	No	The current site owner, or the removal request for outdated content
An image of your signature on a filing	Yes	This tool

The middle rows are where most disappointment lives. People find the tool, recognise it as Google offering help, and file the thing that is actually hurting them. Content that is unflattering rather than identifying is not in scope, and a request outside the categories is closed without much explanation.

Eligibility and how to submit

The tool is available in a growing but not universal set of countries and languages, and it works both on the web and inside the Google app. Availability where you are is the first thing to check.

1. Open the tool from your Google account or tap your profile picture in the Google app and choose Results about you.
2. Enter the details you want monitored: your name, and the phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses you want watched for. Give it the variants, including a maiden name or a former address, since results are matched against what you supply.
3. Review what it finds. The tool surfaces results containing those details.
4. Request removal on each one, choosing between the contact information reason and the intent to harm reason.
5. Watch the status. Requests move through in review to approved or denied, and the dashboard keeps the history.

Google's own documentation is worth reading before the first submission, because it states the categories in Google's words rather than a summary of them. Google's Results About You tool is the page to read, and ten minutes there prevents most of the wasted filings.

One limitation Google states plainly is worth repeating: a removal may be applied only to results returned for searches that include your name, rather than to every possible query. For a private individual that usually covers the realistic threat model, since a name search is how people look for you. For anything broader, it is a partial measure.

Monitoring alerts

The monitoring half is the underrated part. Once configured, the tool notifies you when a new result containing your details appears in Search, which turns an occasional panicked audit into a background process.

It is not comprehensive. It monitors what Google has indexed and matched against the details you gave it, so it misses anything outside Google's index, anything behind a login, and anything that lists you under a spelling you did not supply. Treat it as a smoke detector rather than a perimeter.

Where the tool stops

Three limits, stated directly.

It removes the result, not the record. The broker page still exists and still holds your data. This is why the tool works best paired with opt-outs at the source, which remove the reason for the result. Where the source page is one you control, the fix is different again: Google Search Central on blocking indexing describes the noindex directive, which is the durable way to take your own page out of the index rather than requesting removal result by result.

It is Google only. Other search engines index the same pages and have their own, generally less developed, request processes.

It has nothing to say about content. If what surfaces is a false claim rather than your contact details, this is the wrong door entirely and no amount of refiling changes that. The analysis there is defamation, where the spoken form is called slander and the written or published form is libel. Cornell Law's entry on slander sets out the distinction, and the route is legal rather than a Google form. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

Who Results About You is for

Run it if your home address, phone number, or email appears in search results for your name. That is the case it was built for and it costs nothing but the time.

Run it early if you are about to become more searchable: a new public role, a business launch, a court filing, a move. The monitoring is more valuable before the results appear than after.

Do not run it expecting it to address a review, an article, a thread, or an opinion. Those are real problems with real routes, and the routes are elsewhere. Sorting which of your results belongs to which route, before spending a month on the wrong one, is the first thing a reputation audit does.

What this leaves you

A meaningful reduction in the contact information a stranger can assemble from a name search, achieved free, in an afternoon, with an alert system running afterwards. That is a genuinely good outcome for a tool that costs nothing. It is also a narrow one, and the gap between what it covers and what people arrive hoping it covers is the reason this page spends as much space on the limits as on the process.