How to Customize What Appears in Your Google Search Results

You can't rearrange Google's results, but you can change a lot about what you see: the settings that shape every search, the filters and operators that narrow one search, and the sections that take up the page. If you want to change how your own website appears, that's covered at the end.

Search settings

Open Google's search settings from the settings link at the bottom of google.com or the gear menu on a results page. The useful ones:

• SafeSearch: filter, blur or show explicit results.
• Language and region: choose the language of Google's interface and results, and which country's results you get.
• Personalized results: turn off results shaped by your past activity.

Your search history also affects results. You can view, delete or pause it at myactivity.google.com.

Filters and tools for one search

• Tabs under the search box (Images, News, Videos, Forums, Web and more) change the type of results. Web shows plain links without AI Overviews. See how to search Google without AI answers.
• Tools lets you limit results to the past hour, day, week, month or year, or a custom date range. Under Tools, Verbatim makes Google search for your exact words instead of similar ones.

Search operators

• "exact phrase" finds pages with those words in that order.
• -word leaves out results with that word.
• site:example.com searches only one website.
• filetype:pdf finds a certain kind of file.
• before:2025-01-01 or after:2025-01-01 limits results by date.

Hide the sections you don't want

Google's results pages now carry a lot besides links: AI Overviews, People Also Ask, forum boxes, shopping carousels and ads. There's no setting to remove them, but an extension can hide them. Search Cleaner has a switch for each of these sections, so you can keep the ones you find useful and hide the rest.

Remove results about you

If a result shows your phone number, home address or email, Google's Results about you tool lets you request its removal. If a page has already changed but Google still shows the old version, use Google's Refresh outdated content tool.

Change how your own website appears

Google builds your result from your page, so you change the page, not the result:

• Title: edit the page's title tag. Google sometimes rewrites titles that are too long or don't match the page.
• Description: write a meta description that sums up the page. Google may still pick its own snippet.
• Extras: structured data can make your page eligible for features like review stars or FAQs.

Then ask Google to look again: in Search Console, inspect the URL and click Request indexing. Changes can take days or weeks to show.