How to report a website for scamming to Google in 6 steps

Whether they’re stealing someone’s personal information or selling counterfeit products, the damage phishing and scam sites do is real.

And if you run a company, you might have received angry reviews from customers who think you aren’t doing enough to stop scams.

That’s where Red Points comes in. Our AI-powered brand protection platform removes scam websites from Google, files DMCA notices, and enables you to detect scam sites at scale—safeguarding your brand, customers, and hard-earned revenue.

Our platform, powered by data from 1,300+ clients, shows a dramatic 161% increase in fake website activity since 2022, reflecting the global scope of this issue.

Read on to learn how to report a website for scamming to Google and what you can do to remove scammers permanently.

Step 1: Choose to report a scam website for policy or legal reasons

If you have detected a website impersonating your own, then you can report it to Google as a policy violation and a copyright infringement. Reporting the scam website as a policy violation will hopefully demote that page in the search rankings, and depending on the amount and severity of complaints a website receives, it may be removed altogether from Google Search.

You can report a scam website to Google for two main reasons: 

1. Policy issues 
2. Legal infractions. 

Policy issues include: 

• Spam
• Malware
• Phishing

Legal reasons include: 

• Intellectual property/copyright violation
• The page goes against a court order
• The page violates online sex trafficking or confidential address laws
• The page violates local laws prohibiting terrorism or hate speech

Each policy violation has a separate form, while there’s one form for legal complaints. It is important to note that if you submit a complaint to Google about a policy violation, it will not serve as a legal notice. You will need to submit both complaints separately.

Step 2: Gather documentation for reporting the website

Reporting a site for a policy issue simply requires the website URL. You can provide an optional description.

But if you want to report a site for a legal violation like copyright infringement, you must provide:

URLs of infringing pages

A detailed description of the copyrighted material with a visual sample if possible

A URL that shows your copyrighted material in authorized use (on your website, a distributor’s website, etc)

Step 3: Report the website to Google with the right form

As we mentioned above, there are three forms for reporting a policy violation and one for reporting legal complaints. Here are the details.

Report the website for policy violation

To report a violation of Google’s content and product policy, this page contains all the links you need. Choose whether to report the page for spam, malware, or phishing.

Report spam

Use Google’s spam report form if you think the page exploits Google’s algorithm with spammy content. This could be irrelevant or useless content designed to rank, abusive behavior, deceptive practices, poor quality, or too many paid links. Below is the first part of the form, which requires the URL and reason for reporting.

Next, the form will ask more specific questions about the page. The questions vary depending on the reason you chose in the first step. For example, here’s the second page after choosing “spammy content” as the reason:

Report malware

You can report a site that you think is distributing malicious software with the malware report form. This is a single-page form that requires the URL and gives you the option to describe the content.

Report phishing

Like the malware form, the phishing report form is a single-page form with the URL and page description. You should choose this form if you think the page is attempting to steal personal information by posing as another page.

Report the website for a legal violation

For legal violations such as copyright infringements, you will need to go to Google Legal Support and follow the steps.

Here’s what the form asks:

• The Google product where the content appears
• Whether the request relates to AI within a Google product
• The reason to report (choose Legal)
• The type of reason (intellectual property, court order, or others)

If you select intellectual property as the reason type, you’ll select the type of intellectual property violation:

• Copyright
• Counterfeit
• Trademark

You can also report “circumvention” if you believe the website has tools to bypass copyright protection measures. People who have received a copyright complaint can also file a counter-notice at this step.

Google’s form will ask if you’re the rights owner or authorized to act on their behalf. You’ll then complete the form by describing where the infringing page exists and providing your IP ownership evidence.

Limitations of Google’s legal form

You’ll have the best chance of removing a page if the exact URL is selling counterfeits. If it’s simply using your trademark, Google advises you’ll have to contact the webmaster.

Google cannot resolve legal complaints about websites: this has to be done between the complainant and the website owner. This is a lengthier, more complicated process. If you believe that just one or two websites are impersonating your own, then the best option is for you to manually file the complaints yourself. 

It is worth noting, however, that you may not have detected all of the fake websites infringing your brand’s intellectual property (IP), and if there are several, then manually detecting them, getting them taken down, and monitoring the web for anymore, becomes an impossible task. For the latter case, we recommend automated solutions (more on that below).

Step 4: Monitor legal report progress

You can see the legal reports you’ve filed at reportcontent.google.com/dashboard. You’ll see:

• Report status
• Total URLs
• Approved URLs
• Pending URLs
• Rejected URLs
• URLs not in Google’s index

Unfortunately, this dashboard doesn’t show reports for phishing, malware, or spam. Google uses those reports to improve its algorithms and deindex pages, but it doesn’t guarantee Google will take direct action on the specific URL.

Step 5: Know the limitations of reporting a site to Google

Reporting a fake website to Google is just one piece of the puzzle. Let’s assume that Google removes the page in question from its search results in the best-case scenario. That’s great, but people can still find the site on other search engines like Bing and even AI search services that don’t rely on Google like ChatGPT Search.

Of course, reporting the site doesn’t remove the actual content from the infringing site, either. The owner can still sell counterfeits and run ads on social media to find customers. Getting the content taken down manually requires contacting the owner, host, or registrar and filing cease and desist orders or DMCA takedown notices.

Lastly, who knows if the site you found is the only one using your copyrighted content? There might be more scam sites out there that just aren’t ranking on Google.

Step 6: Automate a holistic takedown process with Red Points

Considering reporting a site to Google may not deindex it and doesn’t remove the page elsewhere, you can have more success working with a platform like Red Points. Our AI-powered brand protection platform detects and removes fake sites on multiple fronts, not just Google. Here’s how it works.

Monitoring 

Firstly, Red Points will monitor the web for any fake websites or social media profiles infringing your copyright, patents, and trademarks. Every hour, Red Points will scan domain databases, search engines, and social media for potential infringements related to your brand.

Detecting

The next step is detection. As you can see below, with one Red Points client, the fake websites detected came to a grand total of 36,000. Try reporting and taking down 36K fake websites without any software to do it for you…

Validations & Prioritization

The Red Points dashboard helps you to prioritize your tasks, by telling you what you have to validate (1), and which web addresses are particularly high risk (2). You can set your own rules when setting up your Red Points Domain Takedown service to further automate the process of reporting fake websites to Google. To date, our platform has validated over 522,000 fake website infringements. Plus, our advanced Copilot AI learns from your patterns over time and suggests the best actions.

Automatic de-indexing

Following identification and confirmation of those infringing pages, Red Points automatically requests Google de-index scam sites so they are not available in the search results.

Enforcing

The next step is making sure the fake and scam websites get reported to Google right away if it is infringing your copyright or trademarks. Red Points will do all the heavy lifting for you, from finding the domain registrant and CMS platform to sending out the takedown requests.

Reporting

One of the great things about Red Points Domain Takedown service is the sheer amount of data you get. From learning which web servers scammers tend to exploit your brand, to the amount of revenue you’ve saved by making sure those fake websites get reported and taken down by Google, there are plenty of ways you can leverage your new-found data.

What’s next

To recap, you can report a website to Google for violating its policies or infringing on your intellectual property rights. Google’s simple forms make this easy, but completing them only goes so far.

Google can’t remove content from a website directly and it won’t file DMCA notices for you. Plus, manually reporting pages can be cumbersome if your company is targeted by scammers. But you can’t afford to let more of your customers fall for the scam.

Now is the time to leverage Red Points’ brand protection solution. Instead of finding pages one by one, our platform scales your efforts by scanning search engines, social media sites, marketplaces, and more. 

We automatically submit de-index requests so more people won’t find the infringing page. If you want to take back control from scammers, reach out to one of our experts today to get scam pages removed from Google.