How to Use Google's 'Results About You' — And Why It's Not Enough
Google's Results About You tool removes your name and address from Google search results — but the source pages and data brokers behind them stay live.
Google rolled out "Results About You" in late 2022 and quietly expanded it through a March 2025 update that broadened the kinds of PII it tracks and improved the alert system. It is free, it lives at myactivity.google.com/results-about-you, and it is genuinely useful.
It is also a thermometer, not a cure. Here is how to set it up, what it actually does, and what it leaves untouched.
One-sentence answer: Google's Results About You scans Google Search for pages containing your personal information and lets you request those pages be removed from search results — but it does not delete the underlying pages and does not touch Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any data broker.
TL;DR
- Free Google tool at myactivity.google.com/results-about-you.
- You add your name, addresses, phone numbers, and emails; Google scans the index and alerts you when matches appear.
- You can submit a removal request for any match in one click.
- It only removes results from Google Search. The source page still exists; Bing and other engines still show it.
- It does not file opt-outs with data brokers — which is where the real supply is coming from.
What the tool actually does
Sign in to your Google account at myactivity.google.com/results-about-you and you can add up to:
- Three home addresses
- Three phone numbers
- Three email addresses
- Your name (with optional variants)
Google then continuously scans its index for pages that contain combinations of those fields — typically name plus address, name plus phone, or name plus email. When it finds a match, it shows up in your dashboard. You can click "Request to remove" and Google routes the request through its delisting pipeline. Approved removals stop the page from appearing in Google Search.
According to Google's public help documentation, removable categories include personal contact info, government ID numbers, financial credentials, login credentials, and explicit imagery posted without consent. Google's reviewers can deny requests if the page is on a government, education, or news domain, or if the content is "broadly useful" — say, a public record on a court site.
Why it is a real upgrade over the old process
Before this tool existed, removing personal info from Google Search meant filling out separate forms for each result — a slow, repetitive task with confusing eligibility rules. Results About You consolidates the workflow into a dashboard, monitors continuously rather than one-shot, and is free.
It is also one of the only first-party tools any major search engine offers for self-service PII removal. Bing has a similar form, but no monitoring dashboard. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index and inherits whatever Bing does or does not remove. Yandex, Baidu, and most non-Western engines have no comparable process at all.
So as a free first move, set it up. Five minutes.
The four things it does not do
This is where the marketing copy and the reality diverge.
1. It does not delete the underlying page
Google can stop showing a Spokeo profile page in its search results. It cannot remove the page from Spokeo. The data is still live on the source, still indexed by other engines, still retrievable by anyone who knows to look on Spokeo directly. From Google's own removal policies: "If the content is removed from the source page, Google will eventually no longer show it in our search results."
In practice that means a removal in Google is a thinner, browser-search-only fix. The address is still on the broker's database, still being sold to advertisers and identity-resolution platforms, still being aggregated into the joined profile that actually matters for identity theft, doxxing, and stalking.
2. It only covers Google Search
Bing has roughly 4% of US desktop search share and a much larger share when you count Copilot, ChatGPT (which uses Bing under the hood for web grounding), and the Microsoft ecosystem. A Google delisting does nothing for any of them.
If you are worried about who can find your address by Googling, the tool helps. If you are worried about who can find it via ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or any other AI assistant that runs a web search to ground its answer, you are mostly in Bing territory.
3. It does not touch AI training data
Most large language models were trained on a snapshot of the public web. If your address was on a people-search profile when Common Crawl scraped it, it is now sitting in a model weights file somewhere. Removing the source from Google's index does not unlearn it from the model.
In practice this matters less than it sounds — modern LLMs largely refuse to surface PII unprompted — but it is a reminder that "remove from Google" and "remove from the internet" are different things by orders of magnitude.
4. It does not work well outside the US
Coverage in English-language US results is solid. Coverage in other languages and regions is patchy, and the GDPR Right to Erasure process for EU residents is a separate workflow Google runs through a different team.
How to set it up in 5 minutes
- Go to myactivity.google.com/results-about-you and sign in.
- Add the personal info you want monitored — your full name, current and recent addresses, phone numbers, emails. Use variants you actually appear under (maiden name, middle initial, etc.).
- Choose notification frequency. "Right away" via email is the default and the right setting.
- Wait. Initial results usually populate within a day or two as Google's pipeline backfills.
- For each match: click "Request to remove" and pick the category that fits. Approved removals usually process in 1–10 days.
What Google's tool misses that you need to fix yourself
Here's the gap, concretely. A typical hit on Results About You looks like this:
Spokeo — Jane Doe, age 38, 123 Maple St, Springfield IL
spokeo.com/Jane-Doe/Illinois/Springfield/p123456789
You can delist that URL from Google in a click. But Spokeo still has your profile. So does Whitepages, BeenVerified, Radaris, MyLife, Intelius, Nuwber, FastPeopleSearch, TruePeopleSearch, and roughly 150 other people-search sites you've never heard of that all reaggregate the same county and voter-records data every 30–90 days.
Removing yourself from those sites at the source is the actual fix. It is more work, but it is the only thing that interrupts the supply, and it is the only thing that protects you on Bing, in AI assistants, and from anyone who searches the site directly.
For a broader inventory of free first-step tools — Google's Results About You is one of them, but there are nine more worth running — see our list of 10 free tools to check what's online about you.
What you can do today
- Set up Results About You. Five minutes, free, real value.
- For every Google match that's a people-search site, also file the opt-out at the source site. Otherwise the page comes back to Bing, to AI tools, and to anyone who knows the URL.
- Set a calendar reminder for 60 days. Brokers reaggregate from public records on a 30–90 day cadence. Removals expire.
- Bookmark the Google removal help center for non-standard cases — explicit imagery, doxxed pages, financial info — which have separate, faster lanes.
- Decide whether to handle this yourself or pay someone. A one-time scrub across 50+ brokers takes 8–12 hours of focused work if you are organized.
The bigger frame
Google's tool is a thermostat. It tells you what is being shown in one specific search engine and gives you one specific remediation. It does not fix the building's heating system. The building is the data broker ecosystem — the thousands of sites that buy and sell your address, phone, and family data, and the public records pipeline that feeds them faster than any tool can remove.
If you want to fix the building, the move is broker opt-outs at the source, ideally on patrol because they relist. That is the entire job description of a privacy agent like Leak Check Me. Scrub the source, watch for relistings, repeat.
Find the leak. Scrub the link. Google's tool is one good lever. It is not the whole machine.