Google is removing legitimate publisher content from Search after accepting fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, with no verification of who filed them. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported that Press Gazette, Search Engine Land, and Moz have each had accurate reporting or content wrongly pulled from the index over the past several years. The pattern points to a governance gap that any site can exploit against a competitor.
Press Gazette said this was the second time fraudulent claims triggered a removal of its reporting, most recently coverage of Clickout Media. Search Engine Land lost an article last March to the same tactic, and Moz had legitimate pages deindexed in 2022. Schwartz wrote that he sees complaints about the practice daily and called it a growing issue.
Google sued companies for weaponizing the DMCA process in 2023, according to Search Engine Roundtable’s earlier coverage cited in the report. The legal action has not stopped the behavior. Search Engine Roundtable also linked separate cases of sites being blackmailed with fake copyright notices, a distinct but related abuse of the same reporting channel.
The mechanics matter more than the anecdotes. On LinkedIn, cited by Schwartz, digital marketer Pedro Dias described the exploit in operational terms: Google does not check the submitter’s identity or credentials before acting on a DMCA request, so any site can target a competitor’s URLs directly. Dias said a single takedown typically keeps a URL out of the index for at least two weeks, and that stacking multiple fraudulent notices against the same URL can extend the removal to a couple of months.
Dias also flagged a detection gap. Sites that rely only on Google Search Central’s warnings inside Search Console, rather than an independent monitoring process, miss roughly 80 percent of DMCA notices filed against them, he said, because Search Console does not surface every claim. That blind spot compounds against a domain when an attacker files against multiple URLs at once, since the target has no reliable way to see the full pattern forming.
Google has not published data on how many fraudulent claims it processes, how often it reverses them, or how long the average wrongful removal lasts before restoration. The July 1 report from Search Engine Roundtable includes no statement from Google addressing the specific cases named. That absence of a company response, paired with a legal action from 2023 that has not curbed the practice, is itself evidence the enforcement gap remains open three years later.
For a search team, the defensive posture has two parts. First, treat DMCA monitoring as an operational function separate from Search Console, since Dias’s estimate suggests Search Console alone will miss most incoming notices; a direct feed from Google’s DMCA reporting tool or a third-party tracking service closes that gap. Second, build a counter-filing playbook now, before an attack happens: know who owns the appeal process internally, keep proof of original publication timestamps on hand, and set an internal SLA for filing a counter-notice within hours, not days, given that removals already run two weeks at minimum and can stretch to months once claims stack.
Search teams that depend on evergreen or investigative content should run a baseline audit of their highest-traffic URLs against Google’s DMCA transparency report now, so a future takedown is caught within hours rather than discovered through a traffic drop weeks later.
Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported this July 1, 2026.
