What to do when someone copies your website.

The short answer

Three different things get called copying, and each has its own fix:

• Someone took your text, photos or illustrations. That is copyright, and notices to the host and to Google usually deal with it.
• Someone imitated your design: a similar layout, the same colours, headings like yours. That may not infringe copyright at all.
• Someone cloned your site to pretend to be you, often to take payments. That is fraud, and it is urgent.

Work out which one you have before you write to anyone. The first and the third are worth acting on today. The second is often worth letting go.

Check what was copied, and save the evidence

• Screenshots of each copied page, with the address and the date visible, saved as files.
• A dated copy from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, whose save feature records a public page on request, so the evidence survives if the copier edits the page.
• Your own dates: your site's revision history, invoices from the writer or photographer, the original photo files and older Wayback copies of your pages.
• A list of exactly what was taken: which paragraphs, which photos, which pages.

Then check what is protected. The US Copyright Office's guidance on websites says text, photographs, illustrations and other artwork can be registered, and lists what it will refuse: ideas, functional design elements, domain names, the layout, format or look and feel of a page, and common material such as names, icons or familiar symbols. So a competitor with a similar layout and the same colours is often within the law, and one using your paragraphs and your photos is not.

Your business name and logo are a trademark question rather than a copyright one. If a rival uses them in a way that confuses customers, take that to an adviser who handles trademarks.

If it is a fake copy pretending to be you

The signs are your name, logo and content on a site with someone else's phone number, a payment page you never set up, or customers telling you they paid a site that was not yours. Act the same day:

• Warn customers on your own site and social pages, and say which address is really yours.
• Report the site to its host and to its domain registrar as fraud or phishing, using their abuse forms.
• Report it to Google Safe Browsing, which has a form for reporting a page.
• If customers paid it, tell your bank or payment provider, and in the US report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
• Keep every report you send and every reply.

If your own site is suddenly sending visitors elsewhere or showing pages you never made, that is a hack, which is a different problem. What to do when your website is hacked covers it.

Find out who runs and hosts the copy

• The site itself: a contact page, an about page, the company name in the footer.
• The domain's registration data. ICANN's lookup tool at lookup.icann.org shows the registrar and any public contact details. The owner's details may be hidden, but the registrar is listed.
• The host. An IP address lookup shows which company hosts the site. If the answer is Cloudflare, report it there anyway: Cloudflare says it shares copyright complaints with the relevant hosting provider and the website's operator, and it hosts content itself only for some of its products.
• In the US, the Copyright Office keeps a directory of the agents that service providers have designated to receive copyright notices, so you can send yours to the right address.

Ask once, in writing

Some copies are made by people who never thought about it: a new business that liked your wording, or a web designer reusing a site they admired. One clear message can end it:

• "Hello. The text and photos on your page [address of their page] were copied from our website, [address of our page], where they have been since 2021. We wrote the text and took the photos ourselves. Please remove them by 14 May. If they are still there after that date, we will ask your hosting company to take the pages down. Sam Ortiz, Ortiz Garden Design."

Send it to the contact address on their site and keep a copy. Give one deadline, and do what you said when it passes. Threats you do not carry out teach a copier to ignore you.

In the US: a DMCA notice to the host

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a notice to a hosting company has to contain six things. In plain words:

• Your physical or electronic signature, as the owner or as someone authorised to act for them.
• The work that was copied, such as your page, your text or your photo.
• The copying material, with enough detail for the host to find it: the exact addresses.
• Your contact details.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent or the law.
• A statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act for the owner.

Many hosts have a web form that asks for these details. The site owner can reply with a counter-notice saying the removal was a mistake. The host then puts the material back no sooner than 10 and no later than 14 business days later, unless you tell its designated agent that you have filed a court action. Anyone who knowingly makes a material misrepresentation in a notice or a counter-notice can be liable for the damage it causes, so claim only what is yours.

Suing is a separate step. For a US work, you must register your copyright with the Copyright Office before you can bring a case in federal court.

Ask Google to drop the copies from search

Google says it complies with copyright notices under the DMCA. Its legal help pages take requests through a web form: choose the product, such as Google Search, choose copyright as the reason, and give the exact addresses of the copying pages and of your originals rather than the home page.

Two things to know before you send it. Google may forward the content of your notice to Lumen, a nonprofit that publishes such notices after removing certain personal information. And removing a page from Google does not remove it from the internet, so you still need the host to take it down.

Google's spam policies also name scraping, republishing other sites' content without adding original content or value, as a practice they target, and say a significant volume of valid copyright removal requests against a site can be used to demote its other content.

In the EU and the UK: a notice to the host

The EU's Digital Services Act has applied to hosting providers since 17 February 2024. Every hosting provider must offer an easy, electronic way to report illegal content, and a notice should contain:

• A substantiated explanation of why the content is illegal: here, that it copies your text or photos.
• The exact addresses of the copying pages.
• Your name and email address.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the notice is accurate and complete.

The host must confirm receipt without undue delay when you give contact details, decide on the notice, and tell you its decision and how to challenge it. A notice precise enough for a diligent host to see the problem without a detailed legal examination gives the host knowledge of it, and a host that knows and does nothing loses its protection from liability.

In the UK, copyright protection is automatic and there is no register of copyright works, so there is nothing to register before you complain. Use the host's abuse or copyright form with the same details.

Does the copy hurt your ranking?

Usually not. Google has said there is no duplicate content penalty in the way most people mean it, and that being scraped by others is a different matter from scraping. When it finds the same content on several sites, it looks at signals to work out which site is the original, which it says usually works, so a site that has been scraped should not expect to suffer for it.

In the rare case where a copy outranks you, Google's advice was to check that your own pages can still be crawled, for example that nothing in your robots.txt file blocks them, and that your sitemap lists them. Search Console's URL Inspection tool shows whether Google can fetch a page. If your pages have dropped out of search for other reasons, why your website is not showing up on Google covers the checks.

If a copy does rank above you for your own business name, that is the case where the request to Google matters most. Send it first.

Three copies, three responses

• A roofing firm finds its service pages, word for word, on a new competitor's site in the next town. It saves screenshots and Wayback copies, emails the competitor with a deadline, then sends a DMCA notice to the host and a removal request to Google when the deadline passes.
• An online store finds its product descriptions and photos on a marketplace listing. It uses the marketplace's own intellectual property report form, which reaches the right team faster than chasing the seller.
• A cleaning company in Denver finds a competitor's new site with a very similar layout, colours and headings, but different text and photos. The US Copyright Office does not register a page's layout or look and feel, so it lets it go and spends the time on its own reviews.

Make the next copy easier to remove

• Keep dated records of who wrote each page and took each photo.
• Keep the original files of photos you took yourself, with their dates.
• Say in your terms of use what others may do with your content. Our own terms of use say the text, renders, illustrations and the GGSites name and logo belong to GGSites, that others may link to the site and quote short passages with credit, and that copying the site or its content in bulk is not allowed.
• Skip scripts that block right-clicking. They annoy visitors and stop nobody who wants the text.
• Write pages only you could write: your jobs, your town, your team. A copy of that reads oddly on someone else's site, and the original is easier to prove. How to write website copy shows how.

If a host ignores notices and the copy keeps coming back, it can be quicker to make your own pages unmistakably yours, as part of a website redesign, and let Google's choice of the original do the rest.

When it is worth paying an adviser

Start with a message and a notice, which cost nothing. Pay for advice when:

• A competitor in your area keeps using your text and photos after notices to the host and to Google.
• Customers mix up the two businesses, which is a trademark question as much as a copyright one.
• A clone is taking payments in your name.
• The copier answers with threats, or a counter-notice you believe is false.
• You can show sales you lost because of the copy.

Bring the evidence file: the screenshots, the Wayback copies, your own dates and every message you sent and received. An adviser who has the file on day one can tell you quickly whether the case is worth more than a notice.

Mistakes to avoid

• Sending a takedown before saving evidence, so nothing is left to show if the copy comes back.
• Claiming things that are not yours, such as a stock photo you only licensed, or a layout.
• Threatening a US lawsuit over a work you have not registered.
• Ignoring a clone that takes payments.
• Rewriting your whole site in a panic, which can cost you the search positions of pages that were doing fine.

This is general information, not legal advice. Copyright, trademark and unfair competition rules differ between countries. If a copy is costing you customers, or the copier refuses to stop, ask an adviser where you and the copier are.