Few search results hit like a mugshot. The photo is old, the case may have been dismissed, dropped, or sealed, and the page still sits at the top of your name, written to sound current. The sites know exactly what that panic is worth, and some of them priced it: pay us, and the photo comes down.
That pricing is now illegal in a growing list of states, and the removal game has changed with it. What has not changed is the order of operations. People who start by paying usually end up paying several sites, because the photo lives in more places than the one they found, and each new copy points back to a source nobody fixed.
The underlying court record is public and usually stays public. The aggregator page quoting it is a separate, commercial republication, and many aggregators will suppress or remove their page on request, under their own policies, or when the source record has been sealed or expunged. Work the source first, then the aggregators, then search visibility, in that order.
Confusing these two wastes months. A court docket, a dismissed case, an old fine: the official record belongs to the court and follows court rules, which in many places include sealing or expungement routes for eligible cases. The aggregator sites that republish it are private businesses optimising for search traffic, and their pages are governed by their own removal policies plus the law on republishing public records, which is broader than most people hope.
That breadth is why honesty matters at the start. Anyone promising to erase a public record itself is selling something they cannot deliver. What can change: sealed source records that aggregators must then honour, aggregator pages removed under policy, and search results that stop surfacing pages nobody updates. A realistic plan works on all three layers without pretending they are one.
If the case is eligible for sealing or expungement, that process is the highest value move available, because aggregators and background check companies key their data off court records, and a sealed record gives removal requests legal weight they otherwise lack. Get the court's disposition documents in order first; every later conversation goes faster with them in hand.
Where the record cannot be sealed, check accuracy instead. Aggregators routinely carry wrong dispositions, cases belonging to a namesake, and charges shown without their dismissal. A documented inaccuracy is a removal or correction claim even where a truthful record would stand, and it is surprising how much of an aggregator profile collapses under one accuracy audit.
Approach each aggregator with the disposition documents, the specific URLs, and the exact change requested: removal, suppression, or correction. Log dates and replies, because follow up with a reference number works and starting over monthly does not. Some sites charge for removal; paying the most visible one while ten mirrors keep the copy is poor arithmetic, so map the mirrors first.
Search visibility is the final layer. Pages that cannot be removed can still lose their audience when they are outdated, unlinked, and pushed below accurate, current information about you. That is slow work measured in months, and it is the honest end of most of these projects: not a vanished record, but a first page of results that reflects the disposition instead of the arrest.
Keep reading: Who we protect covers a nearby case in this series.
The official court record follows court rules and usually remains public unless it is sealed or expunged. Aggregator pages republishing it are a separate layer, and many can be removed, suppressed, or corrected under the sites' own policies.
Not automatically, but it changes your position completely. With sealing or expungement documents in hand, removal requests to aggregators and data brokers carry legal weight, and reputable sites act on them. You still have to send the requests site by site.
Documented errors are strong grounds for correction or removal even when a truthful record would be allowed to stand. Compare every field against the court's disposition documents and submit the mismatches specifically.
Only after mapping all the sites carrying the same record. Paying one visible site while mirrors keep ranking achieves little. Source sealing, accuracy corrections, and requests to the full set of aggregators come first.