📰 New article from TorrentFreak
A DMCA “Bot War”: Google Search Processed 5 Billion Takedown Requests in 2025
https://torrentfreak.com/a-dmca-bot-war-google-search-processed-5-billion-takedown-requests-in-2025/
Let’s be real: Google didn’t just process 5 billion DMCA takedowns in 2025—it survived them.
That’s 14 million URLs flagged per day. Ten thousand every minute. And no, humans didn’t do it. This is a full-on bot war: copyright bots vs. pirate bots, with Google caught in the middle like a tired sysadmin sipping cold coffee at 3 a.m.
The star player? Link-Busters—the shadow library hunter that sent over 3.2 billion takedown requests alone. Their target? Anna’s Archive, the digital library that’s basically the Wikipedia of pirated books. They’re precise, focused, and terrifyingly efficient.
But it’s not all clean hits. Google still gets bombarded with takedown requests for Wikipedia pages, NYT articles, and even dictionary entries. Luckily, its algorithms are pretty good at spotting the nonsense—roughly 3% of requests get ignored for being absurd. Another 8%? Already handled. And a whopping 35%? URLs that hadn’t even been indexed yet—meaning Google’s blacklisting them before they go live. Preemptive copyright takedowns? Welcome to 2025.
Still, over 2.7 billion URLs were successfully removed. The system’s working—but barely. With Link-Busters capped at 10 million/day… for now.
What happens when the bots start fighting each other? We’re about to find out.