Google has granted over 50% of “Right to be Forgotten” requests, over 100,000 links from 91,000 people
Google Grants Majority of ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Requests — Statistics Come as 91,000 People Request Removal of Some Search Results for Their Names
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Europe's top court handed down the ruling that created the 'right to be forgotten', Google is publishing its first hard numbers on how it is applying it: more than 50% of removal requests granted, over 100,000 links delisted at the request of 91,000 people. The wire pickup from Reuters and Bloomberg shows how closely regulators, publishers, and rival platforms are watching whether Google's case-by-case judgments become the de facto standard.
First-order effects
- Roughly half of the 91,000 applicants get what they asked for — named search results disappear from Google's European results — while the other half are refused and must decide whether to appeal or escalate to data-protection authorities.
- Publishers whose articles are delisted lose search traffic on those pages without any notice requirement spelled out in the ruling, putting news organizations directly at odds with Google's adjudication.
Second-order effects
- Google is now the operative decision-maker on a new privacy right with no detailed statutory guidance, so its internal criteria — not the court's abstract balancing test — effectively define where 'public interest' ends for European search.
- Other search engines operating in Europe face the same delisting obligations and must staff comparable review processes, or risk the regulatory action Google is absorbing first.
Third-order effects
- If the grant rate holds, erasure requests normalize into routine platform compliance work rather than exceptional litigation, pushing Europe toward codifying review standards and possibly export controls on delistings so removed links do not simply reappear on non-EU versions of the same search engine.
The trend: Search engines are being converted from neutral indexes into active adjudicators of individual privacy claims, with Google's approval statistics setting the working precedent for Europe's data-erasure regime.