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Google Search has reached a staggering new DMCA takedown milestone, processing over five billion copyright removal requests in 2025. Driven by a massive automated reporting spike, mostly from Link-Busters, the total all-time count has now eclipsed 15.8 billion. Not all reported URLs are actually removed, however. In fact, many were not even indexed by Google to begin with, which is another side effect of the 'bot war'.
Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in a single year. The takedown counter for 2025 has already exceeded five billion.
This figure isn’t just hard to fathom; it represents an explosion in removal requests. The all-time ten billion milestone was passed just over a year ago.
If we break this down further, we see that on average, rights holders flagged more than 14 million allegedly-infringing URLs per day, or close to 10,000 every minute. That stream of takedowns continued throughout the entire year, day and night, a pace that human moderators couldn’t track with a stopwatch, let alone a spreadsheet.
Battle of the Bots?
While little is known about how Google processes these requests, it’s safe to say that these takedowns are not all reviewed manually. Instead, they are likely processed by an algorithm that greenlights URL removals unless there are clear signs that something is wrong.
Similarly, rightsholders also rely on their own ‘bots.’ This definitely applies to Link-Busters, the takedown partner of many major book publishers and the leading sender of takedown notices by far.
In 2025 alone, Link-Busters was good for more than 3.2 billion reported URLs, which dwarfs all other senders. Rivendell is the runner-up with roughly 420 million reported links, followed by MG Premium, the copyright enforcement arm of Pornhub parent company Aylo, which requested 390 million removals.
Not surprisingly, the most targeted domain names are also related to publishing. In fact, the top three domains are all linked to shadow library search engine Anna’s Archive, which has hundreds of millions of URLs flagged.
In terms of accuracy, Link-Busters has a good track record. The company appears to be strictly focused on a subset of problematic sites, mostly shadow libraries. It doesn’t target other domains, which lowers the risk of errors. But the same can’t be said for all senders.
How Google Responded
Every year there are plenty of rightsholders who target seemingly innocent URLs, including IMDb links, Wikipedia entries, New York Times articles, dictionaries, and official government websites. Google is typically good at spotting these errors, as long as the targeted sites have a certain audience and reputation.
If Google spots a problem, it takes “no action”, a response seen in roughly 3% of all URL reports in 2025. A further 8% of URLs could not be removed because the same URL had already been reported previously.
While most reports target live search results, many of the URLs reported in 2025 hadn’t yet been crawled by Google. These are categorized as “not in index,” and they accounted for roughly 35% of all requests this year, totaling more than 1.7 billion links.
These “non-indexed” URLs are placed on a preemptive blacklist by Google to ensure that they don’t appear in future search results. This activity is also emblematic of the “bot battle”, as it often includes mirror domains or new URL structures of pirate sites. These are then picked up or predicted by takedown bots before they’re indexed by Google.
Ultimately, the “removed” category remains the largest. In 2025, Google successfully removed over 2.7 billion URLs, which is roughly 54% of all requests. When we combine this with the “not in index” figures, it’s clear that the vast majority of rightsholder reports result in either successful removal or blacklisting.
As we head into 2026, the question is no longer whether the volume will grow, but rather how much more the system can take. Currently, Link-Busters’ volume appears to be capped at 10 million takedowns per day, but that might change in the future.
Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in a single year. The takedown counter for 2025 has already exceeded five billion.
This figure isn’t just hard to fathom; it represents an explosion in removal requests. The all-time ten billion milestone was passed just over a year ago.
If we break this down further, we see that on average, rights holders flagged more than 14 million allegedly-infringing URLs per day, or close to 10,000 every minute. That stream of takedowns continued throughout the entire year, day and night, a pace that human moderators couldn’t track with a stopwatch, let alone a spreadsheet.
While little is known about how Google processes these requests, it’s safe to say that these takedowns are not all reviewed manually. Instead, they are likely processed by an algorithm that greenlights URL removals unless there are clear signs that something is wrong.
Similarly, rightsholders also rely on their own ‘bots.’ This definitely applies to Link-Busters, the takedown partner of many major book publishers and the leading sender of takedown notices by far.
In 2025 alone, Link-Busters was good for more than 3.2 billion reported URLs, which dwarfs all other senders. Rivendell is the runner-up with roughly 420 million reported links, followed by MG Premium, the copyright enforcement arm of Pornhub parent company Aylo, which requested 390 million removals.
In terms of accuracy, Link-Busters has a good track record. The company appears to be strictly focused on a subset of problematic sites, mostly shadow libraries. It doesn’t target other domains, which lowers the risk of errors. But the same can’t be said for all senders.
How Google Responded
Every year there are plenty of rightsholders who target seemingly innocent URLs, including IMDb links, Wikipedia entries, New York Times articles, dictionaries, and official government websites. Google is typically good at spotting these errors, as long as the targeted sites have a certain audience and reputation.
If Google spots a problem, it takes “no action”, a response seen in roughly 3% of all URL reports in 2025. A further 8% of URLs could not be removed because the same URL had already been reported previously.
While most reports target live search results, many of the URLs reported in 2025 hadn’t yet been crawled by Google. These are categorized as “not in index,” and they accounted for roughly 35% of all requests this year, totaling more than 1.7 billion links.
These “non-indexed” URLs are placed on a preemptive blacklist by Google to ensure that they don’t appear in future search results. This activity is also emblematic of the “bot battle”, as it often includes mirror domains or new URL structures of pirate sites. These are then picked up or predicted by takedown bots before they’re indexed by Google.
As we head into 2026, the question is no longer whether the volume will grow, but rather how much more the system can take. Currently, Link-Busters’ volume appears to be capped at 10 million takedowns per day, but that might change in the future.