Google Takedown Data: 2.7 Million URLs Across 14 Anime Piracy Sites

Rights holders have asked Google to remove about 807,000 HiAnime URLs from its search results. Aniwaves, which draws more visitors than any other site in this analysis according to Similarweb, has 474.

That gap runs through Google's copyright data for 14 anime piracy sites, collected by OtakuDown. The four large sites that have shut down account for 86% of the 2.67 million URLs reported. The ten active sites account for the rest.

How the numbers were collected

Google publishes the copyright removal requests it receives for its search engine in its Transparency Report, broken down by domain, copyright owner and the company that filed each request.

OtakuDown pulled the records for ten active anime sites, mostly from the top of EverythingMoe's anime streaming list, and for four large sites that have closed: HiAnime, Aniwave (formerly 9anime), AnimeFLV and AnimeKai. Where a site has used several domains with the same name, the domains were added together.

The figures count URLs listed in removal requests, not URLs Google removed. Google's public data currently runs to early May 2026, and a single episode can be reported under many different URLs.

The closed giants

Aniwave and its predecessor 9anime top the list with 854,528 URLs reported since 2016, most of them on 9anime.to. HiAnime follows with 807,036 across 13 domains, including its earlier names zoro.to and aniwatch.to. AnimeFLV, the Spanish-language site that the MPA says shut down after action by the MPA and its anti-piracy coalition ACE, has 590,711 since 2012.

HiAnime drew most of its total in its final full year. Rights holders reported 546,988 HiAnime URLs in 2025 alone, before the site went offline in March 2026, and kept reporting about 47,000 more in the first four months of 2026.

AnimeKai, which shut down in May, is smaller in the data, with 39,029 URLs reported since January 2025.

Today's top sites

The sites that took over from HiAnime and AnimeKai look very different in Google's data. The first five are the sites in OtakuDown's September traffic ranking that have records, in order of visits:

• Aniwaves: 474 URLs, all reported since late February 2026. Similarweb estimates about 100 million visits to aniwaves.ru in September.
• Miruro: 37,267 URLs, nearly half of them in the first four months of 2026. Crunchyroll is listed as the copyright owner for 90%.
• Anikoto: 17,316 URLs, three quarters for Crunchyroll.
• animepahe: 100,240 URLs since 2014. Crunchyroll accounts for 58%.
• MKissa, formerly AllAnime: 121,448 URLs, most of them on the old allanime.site domain.
• KickAssAnime: 63,885 URLs, almost all in 2025 and three quarters for Viz Media.
• Anime-Sama, the French-language site: 33,125 URLs. Nearly half are listed under SACEM, the French music rights society.
• AniZone: 862 URLs. Senshi: none.
• Re:Anime, fourth in the traffic ranking: no records. The site first appeared in May 2026, after Google's data ends.

Google's data does not explain the gap. Removal requests are about Google's search results, so they say little about sites that get most of their visitors in other ways. The traffic estimates are for September, while the takedown data ends in May.

Who files the requests

Two names that Google lists as copyright owners account for 44% of all URLs reported across the 14 sites: Japan Creative Contents Alliance LLC, with 622,891, and MX International Inc, with 539,188.

Across all of Google's data, the two names account for about 56.5 million and 67.9 million URLs, mostly against anime and manga sites, with requests going back to at least 2014. Nearly all of them were filed by Remove Your Media, an anti-piracy company based in Plano, Texas.

Viz Media follows with 456,404 URLs across the 14 sites. Crunchyroll, listed under several spellings, has 384,996, plus 164,467 for Funimation, the Sony-owned service that was later merged into Crunchyroll.

Crunchyroll is the leading copyright owner at the newer sites, including Miruro, Anikoto, AnimeKai and animepahe. Its requests are filed mainly by MarkScan and Remove Your Media, according to Google's data.

Remove Your Media filed 68% of all URLs reported across the 14 sites. Japanese companies appear less often under their own names: CODA, the Japanese anti-piracy group, Yomiuri TV, Toei Animation and Toho together account for under 4%.

The full records for each domain, copyright owner and reporting company are public on Google's Transparency Report.