Online Reputation Management in Europe

Online Reputation Management in Europe: How Removal Actually Works

Online reputation management in Europe has more removal routes than anywhere else in the world. The General Data Protection Regulation lets you ask a search engine to delist a result for your name. The Digital Services Act obliges platforms to act on notices about illegal content. Every country has its own defamation and personality-rights law, most have a press council, and the European Court of Human Rights has upheld the anonymisation of a newspaper archive. Each route has limits, though, and some records cannot be removed at all. Our job is to tell you which route fits each link, in your country, before you spend anything. None of this is legal advice; where a case needs a lawyer, we work with local legal partners.

The right to be forgotten under the GDPR

The right to be forgotten began in Europe. In 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled, in the Google Spain case, that a search engine must delist results for a person's name when the information is inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive, and Article 17 of the GDPR now gives that right across the EU and the EEA. Switzerland's revised Federal Act on Data Protection provides a comparable route. Google and Bing each accept requests through their own forms, weigh your privacy against the public interest in the information, and, if they agree, remove the page from results for searches on your name. Google's transparency report shows that roughly half of the URLs requested across Europe since 2014 have been delisted, so how the request is argued matters.

Two limits are worth knowing before you start. Delisting applies to the European versions of a search engine and to searches made from Europe; the Court of Justice confirmed in 2019 that Google is not obliged to delist worldwide, so a page delisted on Google.de can still appear on Google.com for a searcher in New York. And delisting removes a result for your name, not the page itself, which stays on the publisher's site. If a search engine refuses, you can complain to your national data protection authority, such as the CNIL in France, the AEPD in Spain, the Garante in Italy or the Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, or go to court. We prepare the request so the balance is argued properly the first time, and handle the authority route where it is needed. Our personal reputation management service covers delisting alongside suppression.

Negative news, press councils and archive anonymisation

European newsrooms are not obliged to unpublish accurate stories, but most countries have a press council, such as the Presserat in Germany, the Raad voor de Journalistiek in the Netherlands or the Press Council of Ireland, whose code requires significant inaccuracies to be corrected. A well-evidenced complaint can produce a correction, an update, the removal of a name, or de-indexing of a page while it stays in the archive. Anonymisation of archived stories about spent matters is now an established remedy: in 2023 the European Court of Human Rights upheld a Belgian order requiring a newspaper to anonymise the archived online version of a 1994 article about a driver's conviction, finding that the person's right to be forgotten outweighed the archive's interest in keeping the name. Many publishers now have a procedure for exactly this request, and we use it. Our guide on removing a news article from Google search explains the options.

Negative articles outside a newsroom, such as blogs, opinion pieces, listicles and aggregator copies, follow the host's content policy instead. Many copy sites take a page down once the original publisher corrects or removes it, and where an article is unlawful and the author will not act, a Digital Services Act notice to the host or a claim through our legal partners is the escalation.

Defamation and personality rights across Europe

Defamation is national law, and the details differ from country to country. In France, press-law defamation claims must be brought within three months of publication, so speed matters. German law protects a general right of personality, and an injunction ordering the publisher to stop the statement is the usual tool. Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries each have their own civil and, in some cases, criminal provisions. What they share is that a statement must be false or unlawful to be actionable; accurate reporting and fair comment are protected. Where a statement qualifies, a formal notice from a local lawyer is often enough to secure a correction or removal, and a judgment can be submitted to Google and the host. Read more on removing negative search results.

The Digital Services Act

Since February 2024 the Digital Services Act has applied to every online platform serving users in the EU. It requires platforms to provide a notice-and-action mechanism for illegal content, to give a statement of reasons when they refuse or act, to run an internal complaints process, and to recognise certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies. What counts as illegal is still decided by EU or national law, so a notice about a defamatory review or post has to explain why it is unlawful in your country. The Act does not give you a right to remove lawful but unwelcome content, so it supports the other routes rather than replacing them. We draft the notices, track the statement of reasons and escalate through the complaints process when a platform refuses.

Remove my name from Google search

Google's own policies remove certain personal content without any legal process, in every country. Personal contact information such as a home address, phone number or email can be removed on request, as can doxxing content, non-consensual intimate images, and financial or medical details that create a risk of harm. Google's outdated content tool clears results for pages that have already been changed or taken down. These policies do not cover newsworthy information or public records. For everything else that ranks for your name, the route is GDPR delisting, removal at the source, or suppression. Our guide on doxxing covers the personal-information route in more detail.

What cannot be removed: company registers and public records

Some records are public by law and stay that way. National company registers, such as the Handelsregister in Germany, the Kbis extract in France or the Registro Mercantil in Spain, insolvency registers and official gazettes are public records that neither we nor anyone else can remove. Court decisions in most European countries are published anonymised, so a judgment itself rarely ranks for a name; the coverage of it does, and that follows the news and delisting routes above. The honest answer for a public record is suppression: a programme of profiles, interviews, press and owned pages that outrank the record for your name, so it stops being the first thing a client or employer sees.

When removal is not possible: suppression

Accurate, lawful content that the publisher stands behind and the search engine will not delist is suppressed rather than removed, in the language and on the Google domain where your clients search. We tell you up front which links fall into this category, and the quote reflects it; our guide to online reputation management cost explains what drives the price. Review platforms are handled through our negative review removal service, and if a story is still moving, crisis management contains it first.