Guide How to remove divorce records from Google

You found your divorce case on a site you'd never heard of, and you want it gone today. Work in this order: the free aggregator forms first, the court file second, Google last. UniCourt and Trellis both take a redaction request straight from you, with no court order and no fee. Start there. The de-indexing request at the end only works once those pages have already changed.

Redacted, not deleted

Trellis says in writing that it has no legal obligation to act without a court order, and that permanent deletion needs one. Redaction is what you're getting on an unsealed case. Even after every request lands, expect the docket line to survive: party names, case type, filing date.

What each form asks for

UniCourt wants the exact URL of the record, your relationship to it, and the affected party's full name, address, email and phone. Trellis wants your name, your email, confirmation the record is about you, and your reason. Neither one asks for a court order and neither one charges.

What gets it refused

Filing with Google before the page changes. The Refresh Outdated Content tool only re-crawls the URL against what the live page says now. If the aggregator hasn't redacted anything yet, the page still says what it said, and the request is rejected. Change the page first, then file with Google. Never the other way round.

Collect the exact URLs before you file anything

Search your full name in quotes, then your name together with your ex-spouse's name, and write down every URL that comes back. Don't work from memory and don't plan to describe the case later. Every form below wants the exact address of the page pasted into it.

Mark the UniCourt and Trellis URLs. Those are the ones you file on today. Put anything sitting on a county clerk or state judiciary portal, or on a news site, on a separate list. Nothing in the next three sections takes those down, and the court file section below is the only route that reaches them.

judyrecords carries divorce dockets and publishes no removal procedure that we could find. If it's holding one of your results, treat it as a suppression problem rather than a removal one, and don't spend a week hunting for a form.

File the UniCourt redaction request

UniCourt's Public Records Redaction Request runs at unicourt.com/case/removeRecord, and it's three steps: submit the form, verify your email, then select the party name you want redacted. Have the exact UniCourt URL open in another tab before you start, because the form asks for it.

Only a party to the record, a legal guardian or fiduciary, or an attorney representing a party can file. The form asks for your country and state of residence, your relationship to the record, the affected party's full name, address, email and phone, your reason, and any supporting documentation. Attorneys add a bar number and bar state.

UniCourt states that it doesn't charge for submitting, processing, or appealing a request, and that it typically decides within 30 days and puts that decision in writing. A decision is not a removal. One request covers one record, so a case sitting on two UniCourt URLs is two separate submissions, filed the same day.

Then Trellis, straight from the docket page

Open the Trellis page carrying your case and click Request Redaction in the bottom right corner. The walkthrough is at support.trellis.law. The form is short. Your name, your email, confirmation that the record is about you, and your reason.

Trellis never charges for a redaction request and says so on its own page, along with a warning about third parties who do. On an unsealed case you get redacted names, public and logged-out access removed, and a request to search engines not to index the record. If a court has already sealed your case, attach the order, which Trellis says it processes immediately.

Trellis publishes no turnaround and says only that requests are processed in the order they're received. File it, write down the date you filed, and move on to the next item.

If a site is charging you, file this instead

Stop paying. A site demanding money to take your divorce record down has qualified itself for Google's policy on sites that charge for removal, which de-indexes a URL where you're a subject of the content, the site isn't a business review site, and the site requires payment to have the content removed. All three have to be true, and a paywalled removal meets the third one by itself.

Send Google the URL, a screenshot, and enough detail to show the site charges for removal. That's the whole submission, and it's one of two Google requests you file while the page is still up, the other being the court-order route below.

If a site wants a notarized affidavit, a scan of your license front and back, and re-verification every 90 days, file this instead of finishing their loop. You don't need their form, and you don't need their answer, for Google to act on the URL.

The court file: seal the money, not the marriage

Changing what the court itself holds means a motion to seal or redact, filed in the court that issued your judgment. There's no expungement of a divorce, so don't go looking for one. Ask for the least you can live with: name the specific financial filing and the addresses inside it.

In Pennsylvania, the financial source documents, the Marital Property Inventory and the Income and Expense Statement are confidential only if they were filed under a Confidential Document Form. If yours went in without one, Section 8.0(F) of the Case Records Public Access Policy lets a party move to have it sealed after the fact. That's one state, and the statutes don't generalize, so ask your family attorney what your state's version is.

The motion is itself a public filing, your ex-spouse gets notice, and they can oppose it, which can leave you with a denial plus a new searchable document explaining why you wanted it sealed. And we don't practice law: the motion is your family attorney's job, not ours.

De-index last, and only after the page has changed

Once the aggregator has redacted the page or taken it down, file the exact URL with Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool. It re-crawls the URL against what the live page says now, so an unchanged page gets you a rejection. Don't file it before the page changes.

If a court sealed or redacted the record and a site is still showing it, that's a different submission: Google's Legal Help troubleshooter, with the specific URLs and a certified copy of the order. A granted request takes the URL out of Google. The page itself stays where it is.

Skip Results about you. Google won't remove results carrying your personal contact info from pages owned by educational or government institutions, and that's every county clerk and state judiciary portal.

Re-check at 30, 90 and 180 days, and what never comes off

Re-search your name at 30, 90 and 180 days and re-file anything that's back. UniCourt takes one request per record, so every new URL is its own submission. Every form here is free, so what this costs you is the time to run those searches and send the forms again.

Sealing the court file doesn't delete the copies already scraped. Once you have the order, send it to each republisher yourself, one at a time. Redacting an aggregator page seals nothing and expunges nothing in the court's own file.

News coverage doesn't move. If the case produced a written appellate opinion, that one doesn't move either. If your name is uncommon and the docket sits on a state judiciary portal, suppression rather than removal is the honest outcome.

We'll file every one of these for you

You've got the two free forms. If the same case is also on sites you haven't found yet, Court Record Removal is $199, one time: every legal aggregator we can reach, plus twelve months of re-submission for anything that shows up again.

Have us do it.

Everything above, filed for you, chased for you, and reported back. One flat fee.

See the service

Every guide we publish is free and ungated. Browse all of them, see what we do and what it costs, or read why we built this company.

Written by Drew Chapin, who ran all of this on his own name first.