The Short Answer
No. The number of DMCA notices a takedown service sends tells you how busy it is, not how much of your content came down. Google publishes the outcome of the copyright removal requests it receives, and its data shows how far apart the two numbers can be: one reporting organization has asked Google to delist about 381 million URLs, and about 136 million of them, 35.8%, were not in Google's search index at all. For those, there was no search result to remove. What gets a leak off the internet is a notice that reaches someone who can act on it, followed up with the site's host and with the search engines. A bigger total doesn't do that on its own.
Where the Data Comes From
Google has published its Transparency Report on copyright delistings since 2011. Anyone who asks Google to remove a search result for copyright reasons ends up in it, either as a copyright owner or as a reporting organization acting for one. Takedown services show up as reporting organizations. Across all senders, Google counts requests for more than 17.9 billion URLs since March 2011.
For each reporting organization, the report shows how many URLs it asked Google to delist and what happened to them. Two outcomes matter for this article:
- Removed: the URL was in Google's search results, and Google took it out.
- Not in index: the URL was not in Google's search index, so there was no result to take out.
The rest is split into smaller buckets: duplicates, URLs Google decided not to act on, and requests still pending.
What the Numbers Show
Take one of the large reporting organizations in the creator-protection market. Through April 2026, the latest week Google has published, it had asked Google to delist 380,932,701 URLs over about 5.9 million requests. This is the outcome breakdown Google shows for it:
| Outcome | URLs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Removed | 239,816,682 | 63.0% |
| Not in index | 136,325,497 | 35.8% |
| Duplicate | 2,454,535 | 0.6% |
| No action taken | 1,966,857 | 0.5% |
| Pending | 369,130 | 0.1% |
That is 136 million URLs, more than a third of the total, that were not in Google's index when the request came in.
To be fair to the sender, Google does process these requests. Its Transparency Report FAQ explains that it accepts notices for any URL, so that a page it crawls later doesn't start showing up in results with a notice already filed against it. That has some value. But on the day it is sent, a request like that removes nothing from search, and a search engine request never touches the copy on the site itself.
None of this means that sender doesn't remove content: 240 million removed URLs is a lot of removals. The point is narrower. A headline volume number counts what was sent. It doesn't tell you what came down, or where.
Why Volume and Removals Drift Apart
- Sending is cheap, checking is not. Software can generate a notice for each URL a search turns up, including pages that were never indexed, already gone, or sent before. Each one adds to the total.
- A notice sent to the wrong place goes nowhere. Leak sites move domains, change hosts, and stop reading the abuse address they listed last year. A notice to an inbox nobody reads still counts as sent, and the copy stays up.
- Delisting is not removal. When a search engine drops a result, the page is still on the site. People can still reach it from a direct link, a forum post or a Telegram channel.
- Google is not the only search engine. Bing powers the results on Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. A page that is gone from Google can still be found there.
What Actually Gets Content Down
- A notice to the site's current DMCA contact. The site can delete the copy where it lives, so the notice has to reach a person or process there that actually acts on it.
- The host, when the site doesn't act. The company whose servers keep the site online has its own abuse process, and a host can act when the site ignores its notices.
- The search engines, so the page stops being found. A delisting request to Google, and to Bing for the engines it powers, cuts off the main way people find a leak while the site and host deal with it.
- Checking again. Leaks come back in waves. A link that came down last month can be re-uploaded somewhere else this week, so the work goes on until new copies stop turning up.
Questions to Ask Any Takedown Service
- Where do your notices go, and how do you know the contact is still current?
- What do you do when a site ignores a notice?
- Which search engines do you send removal requests to on my plan?
- Can I see, link by link, whether a copy came down from the site or only from search?
A service that can answer those clearly is telling you how it gets content down. A service that only answers with a total is telling you how much it sends.
How LeakRemover Works
We scan widely and send carefully. Some takedown services send removal requests by the hundreds of millions, and a large share goes to pages that aren't even in Google's index. A request like that removes nothing. We keep a register of the sites where creators' content gets leaked, and we keep each site's DMCA contact up to date, so the notice reaches someone who can take the copy down. If the site doesn't act, we go to its host and ask the search engines to delist the page: Google on every plan, and Bing from Advanced, which also powers Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Our team files with Yandex on request. We don't stop at Google.
Your dashboard shows each link in four columns: Google search, Bing search, Website (DMCA), and Link online, which tells you whether the page still loads. So you can see what actually happened to each copy, not just that a notice went out. Most of the Google removals we confirm come through within a day.
Creators don't need more notices sent. They need their content to come down. If you want to see where your content is right now, run a free scan.
Data: Google Transparency Report, copyright delistings, read on October 15, 2026. Google's published data runs through the week of April 27, 2026. This article is educational and not legal advice.
