How to Check If Your Anti-Piracy Service Is Actually Working
Google publishes a free, public database that shows exactly how many takedown requests any anti-piracy service has filed—and how many actually succeeded. Most authors don’t know it exists.
If you’re paying for a DMCA takedown service, you’re trusting that service to do the work they say they’re doing. You’re trusting that they’re finding pirated copies of your books, filing accurate takedown requests, and getting those links removed from search results.
But how do you verify that?
Most authors can’t. They rely on whatever reports their service sends them—if they send reports at all. They have no independent way to confirm whether the numbers they’re being told match reality.
Except they do. Google built one, and it’s sitting right there in the open.
How Google Tracks DMCA Takedown Requests
Google’s Transparency Report is a publicly accessible database that tracks every copyright removal request submitted to Google Search. It’s available at transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/explore and anyone can search it—no login required.
The report lets you look up data in three ways: by copyright owner (the person or company whose work was pirated), by domain (the piracy site being targeted), and by reporting organization (the service filing the takedown requests).
That third tab—Reporting Orgs—is the one that matters most if you’re evaluating an anti-piracy service.
Type the name of any takedown service into that search bar, and Google will show you their complete filing history: how many URLs they’ve requested to be delisted, how many copyright owners they represent, how many piracy domains they’ve targeted, and—most importantly—what happened to those requests.
This isn’t data the service controls or can spin. It’s Google’s own record of what was filed and what the outcome was.
What Google Transparency Report Outcomes Mean
When you pull up a reporting organization’s profile, you’ll see a breakdown of outcomes for every URL they’ve submitted. Understanding what these categories mean is the key to reading the data correctly.
Removed—This is the number that matters most. These are URLs that Google reviewed, confirmed as infringing, and delisted from search results. When a pirated copy of your book gets removed from Google’s index, it becomes dramatically harder for anyone to find it. This is the whole point of de-indexing, and the percentage of URLs that end up in this category tells you how effective the service actually is at getting results.
Not in index—This means the URL wasn’t in Google’s search index at the time the request was processed. It might have already been removed, the page might have gone offline, or it might never have been indexed in the first place. A small percentage here is normal—piracy sites are volatile, and links go dead. But a very high percentage in this category raises questions. If a service is consistently filing requests on URLs that aren’t even in Google’s index, it could mean they’re submitting stale data, filing on links that are already dead, or casting an extremely wide net without verifying what’s actually live before they file. Volume looks impressive on paper, but if the majority of what’s being filed was never going to be found by a reader searching for your book, those numbers aren’t protecting you.
No action taken—Google reviewed the request and declined to remove the URL. This can happen for several reasons: the request didn’t contain enough information, the content didn’t appear to infringe, or the filing didn’t meet Google’s standards. A low percentage here is normal. A high percentage suggests accuracy problems with how the requests are being prepared and filed.
Pending—The request is still being processed.
Duplicate—The same URL was submitted more than once.
What Is a Good DMCA Takedown Success Rate
Raw URL counts are the number most services want you to focus on. Big numbers sound impressive. But the percentage breakdown of outcomes matters far more than the total volume.
Here’s what to look at when you’re evaluating any service:
What percentage of their filings actually result in removal? This is the single most important metric. A service with a 90% removal rate is delivering real results—every filing is doing what it’s supposed to do. A service filing massive volume but only achieving 30% removal is generating a lot of activity without the outcomes to match. The goal is getting pirated content removed from search results, and the removal percentage tells you how consistently that’s happening.
What percentage shows “not in index”? If this number is extremely high—50%, 60%, 80% or more—ask why. A service with a high “not in index” rate may be filing on dead links in bulk, which inflates their total URL count without actually protecting your books. It might look like they’re doing a lot of work, but work that targets links no reader would ever find isn’t reducing your piracy exposure.
Who are their copyright owners? Click into the copyright owner list and look at who the service is actually representing. Are the clients book authors? Or are they television networks, music labels, adult entertainment companies, software firms, or academic publishers? A service that primarily represents a completely different industry may not have the specialized knowledge needed to fight book piracy effectively. The piracy landscape for books is different from the landscape for music, film, or software. The sites are different. The distribution methods are different. The search patterns are different. Industry specialization matters.
How many copyright owners do they serve? This gives you a sense of scale, but also of focus. A service representing tens of thousands of clients across every content category is operating as a high-volume processing machine. A service representing a focused group of book authors is more likely to be providing the kind of individualized attention that catches the piracy specific to your catalog.
Why Book Authors Need a Specialized DMCA Takedown Service
The book piracy world has its own ecosystem. There are piracy sites that specialize in ebooks and audiobooks specifically—sites that most general anti-piracy services may not monitor as closely because they don’t generate the same volume of takedown opportunities as film, music, or adult content piracy.
When you’re choosing a service to protect your books, you want to know that the service understands that ecosystem. The Transparency Report won’t tell you everything about how a service operates, but it will tell you where their experience is concentrated and how effective their filings are at achieving the outcome that actually matters: getting pirated content delisted from search results so readers can’t find it.
How to Look Up Any DMCA Takedown Service on Google’s Transparency Report
The process takes about sixty seconds:
Go to transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/explore. Click the “Reporting orgs” tab at the top of the data table. Type the name of the service you want to evaluate into the search bar. Click on their name to see their full profile, including the outcome breakdown, the copyright owners they represent, and the piracy domains they’ve targeted.
If you’re already working with a takedown service, look them up. If you’re considering hiring one, look them up before you sign. The data is free, it’s public, and it comes directly from Google.
Does the Google Transparency Report Show All DMCA Takedowns
This is an important distinction that most people miss, and it’s worth understanding before you draw conclusions from the numbers.
Google’s Transparency Report only tracks one specific type of takedown: requests to remove URLs from Google Search results. That’s called de-indexing. It’s one important piece of the puzzle, but it’s far from the whole picture.
A comprehensive anti-piracy operation also files takedowns directly with hosting providers to get the infringing files removed at the source. It files with file-hosting services where pirated copies are stored. It files with domain registrars. It files with other search engines like Bing. It targets cloud storage platforms, social media sites, and anywhere else pirated content surfaces.
None of that work shows up in Google’s Transparency Report. Not a single one of those filings is counted there.
So when you see a service’s number on Google’s report, you’re seeing one piece of a much larger operation. Any service that takes a multi-front approach will have a Transparency Report number that’s significantly lower than their total takedown count—because the report only captures the Google Search layer of the work.
BookDefender’s DMCA Takedown Results
BookDefender has filed over 5.5 million takedowns across all platforms with a success rate above 95%. That total reflects the full scope of the work—every filing to every hosting provider, file host, search engine, and platform where pirated copies of our clients’ books have appeared.
Of those 5.5 million, over 1.3 million were filed with Google specifically—and the overwhelming majority of those resulted in successful removal, because every request we file has been verified by a human before it’s submitted. We don’t submit dead links to pad our numbers. We don’t file on URLs that aren’t actually infringing. We verify first, then file.
It’s also worth noting that Google’s Transparency Report data updates on its own schedule, and the most recent data available for BookDefender only reflects filings through early February 2026. Since then, we’ve made significant automation upgrades to our detection and filing systems that have increased both our speed and our volume—while keeping human verification at the center of every request. Automation handles the scale. Humans ensure the accuracy. Those improvements aren’t reflected in the current report data yet, but they will be.
That approach is why BookDefender maintains one of the highest removal rates you’ll find in the Transparency Report for any reporting organization focused on book piracy. It’s also why Google granted BookDefender membership in the Trusted Copyright Removal Program (TCRP)—a status reserved for reporting organizations that have demonstrated consistent accuracy and legitimacy in their filings.
Our copyright owner list tells the rest of the story. It’s authors. Not television studios, not music labels, not software companies. Authors. That’s who we built this service for, and that’s whose books we protect every day.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Go look.
BookDefender is a Google TCRP member with over 5.5 million takedowns filed across all platforms and more than twenty years of experience fighting book piracy. Verify our Google Search de-indexing record at Google’s Transparency Report — search “BookDefender” under Reporting orgs. Learn more at bookdefender.com.