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Google has processed billions of DMCA takedown requests during the first months of the year. Reporting agency Link-Busters remains the top sender. While its dominance remains, the company appears to have hit a takedown ceiling of roughly 70 million URLs per week. Google won't confirm whether there's a limit on the notices it processes and says that trusted parties "can submit the quantity they need."
Link-Busters is the preferred anti-piracy partner for many of the world’s largest book publishers, including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.
The Dutch company is also the most active DMCA sender at Google by a wide margin, flagging billions of ‘pirate’ URLs in the search engine, mostly from shadow libraries.
6.5 Billion and Plateauing
Google recently updated its search transparency report, showing that Link-Busters now accounts for more than 6.5 billion delisting requests. This is more than a third of the nearly 18 billion requests Google received in total.
The 6.5 billion is also more than four times the volume of the next-largest reporting organization, Rivendell, which sits just under 1.5 billion. MG Premium, the enforcement arm of Pornhub parent Aylo, follows with roughly 1.26 billion removal requests.
Top reporting partners
These mind-boggling numbers are all the more impressive when you realize that the company only started ramping up its takedown efforts less than three years ago. In record time, its output dwarfed that of all competitors. However, its takedown activity no longer appears to be growing.
Looking at Link-Busters’ takedown activity, we see a near-vertical rise through 2023 and into 2024, which flattened into a plateau in the 60 to 70 million weekly range about a year ago. The volume is enormous, but it is no longer growing.
Plateauing?
The shape of the data suggests a hard ceiling rather than a coincidental drop in infringing material to report. To find out what is keeping these URL reports on a plateau, we reached out to Link-Busters, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.
“The Quantity They Need”
TorrentFreak asked Google directly whether it enforces a daily cap, and if so, why. A spokesperson for the search engine did not confirm or deny the existence of a hard cap. Instead, they pointed out that trusted rightsholders get what they need.
“We offer a Trusted Content Removal Program (TCRP) that provides a path for bulk submissions from trusted partners, and work to ensure the accuracy of these submissions and that these partners can submit the quantity they need,” a Google spokesperson said.
The response did not directly answer our question. It is, however, more reserved than the response we received in 2013, when Google said there was “no limit on the number of DMCA notices” rightsholders may send in.
At the time, Google was accused of enforcing a cap of 10,000 URLs per day per rightsholder, which anti-piracy group BREIN was trying to raise to 40,000. In that context, a ceiling of roughly 10 million reported URLs per day for a single reporter would be a 1,000-fold increase.
3.5 Billion Reported URLs a Year….
At the current rate, Link-Busters is reporting roughly 3.5 billion URLs per year. The company has a good standing when it comes to the accuracy of its notices, with less than a percent being duplicates or other errors. That’s well below the average error rate.
Finally, it should be noted that nearly 8% of the reported URLs were not indexed by Google, yet. Google removed these URLs proactively to accommodate rightsholders.
Whether the 70 million weekly figure is a deliberate limit, a technical bottleneck, or simply the point at which Link-Busters’ own crawling capacity tops out, remains a mystery for now. What is clear is that the line was drawn nearly a year ago and appears to be holding.
Ceiling or not, Link-Busters remains comfortably the largest DMCA sender Google has ever seen. No other company comes even close to hitting the same 70 million ceiling.
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