We invest heavily in fighting child sexual abuse and exploitation online and use our proprietary technology to deter, detect, remove and report offences on our platforms.

We partner with NGOs and industry on programmes to share our technical expertise, and develop and share tools to help organisations fight CSAM.

Learn more about our child safety toolkit here.

Fighting abuse on our own platforms and services

Google has been committed to fighting child sexual abuse and exploitation on our services since our earliest days. We devote significant resources – technology, people and time – to deterring, detecting, removing and reporting child sexual exploitation content and behaviour.

What are we doing?

Preventing abuse

Preventing abuse


We aim to prevent abuse from happening by ensuring that our products are safe for children to use. We also use all available insights and research to understand evolving threats and new ways of offending. We take action not just on illegal CSAM, but also wider content that promotes the sexual abuse of children and can put children at risk.

Detecting and reporting

Detecting and reporting


We identify and report CSAM with trained specialist teams and cutting-edge technology, including machine-learning classifiers and hash-matching technology, which creates a 'hash', or unique digital fingerprint, for an image or a video so that it can be compared with hashes of known CSAM. When we find CSAM, we report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which liaises with law enforcement agencies around the world.

Collaborating globally

Collaborating globally


We collaborate with NCMEC and other organisations globally in our efforts to combat online child sexual abuse. As part of these efforts, we establish strong partnerships with NGOs and industry coalitions to help grow and contribute to our joint understanding of the evolving nature of child sexual abuse and exploitation.

How are we doing it?

Fighting child sexual abuse on Search

Fighting child sexual abuse on Search


Google Search makes information easy to find, but we never want Search to surface content that is illegal or that sexually exploits children. It's our policy to block search results that lead to child sexual abuse imagery or material that appears to sexually victimise, endanger or otherwise exploit children. We are constantly updating our algorithms to combat these evolving threats.

We apply extra protections to searches that we understand are seeking CSAM content. We filter out explicit sexual results if the search query seems to be seeking CSAM, and for queries seeking adult explicit content, Search won’t return imagery that includes children, to break the association between children and sexual content. In many countries, users who enter queries clearly related to CSAM are shown a prominent warning that child sexual abuse imagery is illegal, with information on how to report this content to trusted organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, and Te Protejo in Colombia. When these warnings are shown, users are less likely to continue looking for this material.

YouTube’s work to combat exploitative videos and materials

YouTube’s work to combat exploitative videos and materials


We have always had clear policies against videos, playlists, thumbnails and comments on YouTube that sexualise or exploit children. We use machine learning systems to proactively detect violations of these policies and have human reviewers around the world who quickly remove violations detected by our systems or flagged by users and our trusted flaggers.

While some content featuring minors may not violate our policies, we recognise that the minors could be at risk of online or offline exploitation. This is why we take an extra cautious approach when enforcing these policies. Our machine learning systems help to proactively identify videos that may put minors at risk and apply our protections at scale, such as restricting live features, disabling comments and limiting video recommendations.

Our CSAM transparency report

Our CSAM transparency report


In 2021, we launched a transparency report on Google’s efforts to combat online child sexual abuse material, detailing how many reports we made to NCMEC. The report also provides data around our efforts on YouTube, how we detect and remove CSAM results from Search, and how many accounts are disabled for CSAM violations across our services.

The transparency report also includes information on the number of hashes of CSAM we share with NCMEC. These hashes help other platforms identify CSAM at scale. Contributing to the NCMEC hash database is one of the important ways that we, and others in the industry, can help in the effort to combat CSAM because it helps reduce the recirculation of this material and the associated re-victimisation of children who have been abused.

Reporting inappropriate behaviour on our products

Reporting inappropriate behaviour on our products


We want to protect children using our products from experiencing grooming, sextortion, trafficking and other forms of child sexual exploitation. As part of our work to make our products safe for children to use, we provide useful information to help users report child sexual abuse material to the relevant authorities.

If users have a suspicion that a child has been endangered on Google products such as Gmail or Hangouts, they can report it using this form. Users can also flag inappropriate content on YouTube, and report abuse in Google Meet through the Help Centre and in the product directly. We also provide information on how to deal with concerns about bullying and harassment, including information on how to block users from contacting a child. For more on our child safety policies, see YouTube’s community guidelines and the Google Safety Centre.

Developing and sharing tools to fight child sexual abuse

We use our technical expertise and innovation to protect children and support others to do the same. We offer our cutting-edge technology free of charge for qualifying organisations to make their operations better, faster and safer, and encourage interested organisations to apply to use our child safety tools.

Content Safety API

For many years, Google has been working on machine-learning classifiers to allow us to proactively identify never-before-seen CSAM imagery so that it can be reviewed and, if confirmed as CSAM, removed and reported as quickly as possible. This technology powers the Content Safety API, which helps organisations classify and prioritise potential abuse content for review. In the first half of 2021, partners used the Content Safety API to classify over six billion images, helping them identify problematic content faster and with more precision so that it can be reported to the authorities.

CSAI Match

In 2014, YouTube engineers developed and adopted technology to tag and remove known CSAM videos from our services. We share this technology with others through CSAI Match, an API that helps identify re-uploads of previously identified child sexual abuse material in videos. CSAI Match is used by NGOs and companies to help them identify matches against our database of known abusive content so that they can responsibly action it in accordance with local laws and regulations.

Alliances and programmes

We are an active member of several coalitions, such as the Technology Coalition, the ICT Coalition, the WeProtect Global Alliance, and INHOPE and the Fair Play Alliance, that bring companies and NGOs together to develop solutions that disrupt the exchange of CSAM online and prevent the sexual exploitation of children.

Together we fund child safety research, and share tools and knowledge, such as our insights into transparency reporting, in-product detection and operational processes.

In partnership with

Ad Grants through Google.org

Ad Grants through Google.org


Google.org offers grants to organisations leading the fight against child sexual abuse and exploitation, like INHOPE and ECPAT International. Additionally, since 2003, Google.org has given approximately $90 million in free advertising budget to NGOs and charities who operate child sexual abuse reporting hotlines, helping them reach those who need support the most.

Google Fellow programme

Google Fellow programme


We fund technical fellowships at organisations dedicated to fighting child sexual abuse like NCMEC and Thorn. In addition, Google provides training to law enforcement officials investigating online crimes against children through forums such as the Crimes Against Children Conference and the National Law Enforcement Training on Child Exploitation.