Google Just Made It Easier to Remove Explicit Images From Search. Here’s What That Does — and Doesn’t — Fix.

If you’ve found an explicit image of yourself online that you never agreed to, please know this guide is written for adults. If you are under 18, stop here and go directly to the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org, or call 1-800-843-5678.

In February 2026, Google rolled out a genuinely useful update: a much simpler way to request removal of non-consensual explicit images — including AI-generated deepfakes — directly from Search results. If you’ve ever tried to get an image taken down before, this is worth knowing about, and worth understanding exactly what it does.

What Changed

Before this update, getting an explicit image removed from Google meant hunting through help center pages and filing a separate report for every single URL — exhausting, especially when the same image kept reappearing on new sites.

Now, the process lives right inside Search itself:

1. Find the image in Google Search or Google Images
2. Click the three dots on the result
3. Select “Remove result,” then choose “It shows a sexual image of me”
4. Fill out a short form — and you can now report multiple images in a single request instead of one at a time

Requests get tracked through Google’s “Results about you” hub, with status updates by email, and Google also surfaces links to emotional and legal support resources during the process. There’s also a new opt-in feature that creates a digital fingerprint of a reported image so similar copies are filtered out automatically going forward, instead of requiring a fresh report every time it resurfaces somewhere new.

The Part Worth Understanding Clearly

Here’s the distinction that matters most, and it’s easy to miss: this removes the image from Google’s search results — it does not remove the image from the website hosting it.

Delisting and takedown are two different tools, and they solve two different problems. Delisting (what Google’s new tool does) stops people from finding the image by searching your name. The image itself, though, still exists on whatever site posted it — and it can still be found by anyone who has the direct link, or by people searching in other ways.

Getting the actual content taken offline requires a separate step: contacting the site hosting it directly and requesting removal there.

Where Korrald Fits

This is exactly the gap Korrald was built for. Google’s tool handles the search visibility half of the problem — genuinely well, and it’s free, and we’d encourage anyone dealing with this to use it. But someone still has to find every site actually hosting the image and request removal from each one individually — which is the harder, more time-consuming half.

Korrald continuously scans the web for your images — not just what shows up in a Google search, but the sites hosting them directly — and helps you prepare and send a plain-language removal request to the site itself. Used together, Google’s tool and Korrald cover both halves: getting the image out of search results, and getting it off the site where it actually lives.

If You’re Dealing With This Right Now

• Use Google’s new tool to request removal from Search — it’s fast, free, and worth doing regardless of anything else.
• Document the image and the URL where it’s hosted before you do anything else.
• If you know who posted it or it’s part of ongoing harassment, consider reporting to law enforcement or the FBI at IC3.gov.
• For getting it removed at the source — not just delisted from search — Korrald can help you find where your images are being used and prepare a removal request.

This article is for general informational purposes and isn’t legal advice. If you’re in immediate danger, contact local law enforcement.