Google uses automated systems to discover content from the web and other sources. These systems generate search results that provide useful and reliable responses to billions of search requests that we process daily.
Google Search encompasses trillions of web pages, images, videos and other content, and the results might contain material that some could find objectionable, offensive or problematic.
Google’s automated systems help protect against objectionable material. Search results should be useful and relevant, and limit spam responses. We may manually remove content that goes against Google’s content policies, after a case-by-case review from our trained experts. We may also demote sites, such as when we find a high volume of policy content violations within a site.
For more information, visit these sites:
- Learn how Google maximizes access to information
- Google’s Search Essentials
- Spam policies for Google web search
Overall content policies for Google Search
These policies apply to content surfaced anywhere within Google Search, which includes web results. Web results are web pages, images, videos, news content or other material that Google finds from across the web.
Search features policies
These policies apply to many of our search features. Even though these features and the content within them is automatically generated as with web results, how they're presented might be interpreted as having greater quality or credibility than web results. We also don't want predictive or refinement features to unexpectedly shock or offend people. Search features covered by these policies include panels, carousels, enhancements to web listings (such as through structured data), predictive and refinement features, and results and features spoken aloud. These policies don't apply to web results.
Feature-specific policies
Some search features have specific policies that are necessary due to the particular ways they work. To learn more, go to the following pages:
- Autocomplete (Last updated: February 2024)
- Dictionary boxes (Last updated: February 2023)
- Featured snippets (Last updated: October 2022)
- Google Discover (Last updated: February 2024)
- Google News (Last updated: September 2023)
- Google Podcasts (Last updated: March 2023)
- Image & video boxes (Last updated: December 2023)
- Knowledge Graph & Knowledge Panels (Last updated: July 2023)
- Product listings (Last updated: December 2022)
- Structured data
- Structured data for job postings (Last updated: May 2020)
- User content on Search