Incogni review: what the removal service sends, and what it can't remove

This Incogni review is for anyone deciding whether to hand the job of writing to data brokers over to a subscription. Incogni's pitch is simple: you sign a form once, and it keeps sending deletion requests to a long list of brokers under privacy laws such as the CCPA and the GDPR. What it does well is volume and persistence. What it cannot do matters just as much, and most of it is written down in its own help center if you know where to look.

How we compared: we read Incogni's help center, pricing page and published broker list as they stood in October 2026, Deloitte's limited assurance report on its process, and the independent research named below; we did not sign up for the service.

Privacy toolkit for this job

• NordPassEmail Masking (Premium and Family plans) gives each form its own forwarding address, so brokers never get your main inbox.Start with NordPass

Picked from published documentation and reviews, not our own testing. We earn a commission from some services we link to. The full Privacy kit

Who runs Incogni

Incogni's help center describes it as a product provided by Surfshark, the VPN company. You can buy it on its own, and its Standard plan also comes inside two bundles: Surfshark One+ and NordVPN's Ultra plan. That detail matters later, because if you got Incogni through a bundle, cancellation and refunds go through Surfshark or NordVPN rather than Incogni.

It is sold to residents of the US and its territories, Canada, the UK, the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Its two top plans, Protect and Concierge, are for US residents only.

How a request actually goes out

This is the sequence as Incogni's help center lays it out.

1. You give it the basics. Full name (with a middle name if you have one), date of birth and your most recent home address. If the address is in the US, a phone number is required too, because many US people-search sites match records by phone. You can add up to three email addresses and three home addresses, and US customers up to three phone numbers.
2. You sign an authorization form. It lets Incogni ask brokers to delete your data and, if they refuse, complain to a data protection authority in your name. Incogni says the authorization stops working for each broker once that broker confirms it removed your data or found none.
3. Requests go out under privacy law. Incogni files under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the CCPA, Canada's PIPEDA and similar laws, depending on where you live. Those laws set response deadlines, which its help center puts at about 30 days under the GDPR and 45 days under the CCPA.
4. Many requests are an educated guess. Most US data brokers sell to other businesses and have no public search, so Incogni cannot check whether they hold your file. It uses an algorithm to predict which ones probably do and writes to them anyway. The help center admits this produces false positives: requests to companies that never had your data.
5. Sometimes it needs you. When a broker shows several possible matches, Incogni emails you to pick the one that is yours, and the choice cannot be changed afterward. Some brokers also write to you directly to confirm a request. Incogni's advice is to reply asking them to deal with Incogni, copying its opt-out address, or to click the confirm button when the email comes from an automated compliance service.
6. It repeats. Requests keep going out for as long as you subscribe, because brokers relist people when they buy fresh data.

On that last point, the clearest evidence comes from Deloitte rather than from Incogni's own pages. In a limited assurance report dated August 2025, Deloitte said that as of July 2025 Incogni sent recurring requests at intervals of no more than 60 days for public brokers and 90 days for private ones (unless you were already on a broker's suppression list), covered more than 420 brokers, and did not sell customer data during 2024. Limited assurance is a lighter review than a full audit, and it speaks to the process: requests sent on schedule, not how many listings disappeared.

What the dashboard shows

The dashboard is where Incogni looks strongest on paper. Its help center describes:

• Running totals: requests sent, completed (the broker removed your data or said it had none), in progress, scheduled (repeat requests and follow-ups), suppressed (the broker says it will not collect you again) and monitoring.
• A broker overview: every broker relevant to you, with a compliance score (compliant, inconsistent, resistant or undetermined), a severity rating of low, medium or high for how sensitive its data tends to be, the latest status and the date of the next request. An escalated status means the broker ignored several requests and Incogni is pushing harder.
• An exposures page: each request with its own ID, a timeline of past and future steps, and the specific details that were sent for removal.
• Monthly email updates while your subscription is active.

Read those reports for what they are. Incogni's help center says plainly that it does not know what personal information each broker actually removed; it tracks requests and responses. A broker marked completed may simply have replied that it had nothing on you.

The broker list, and what the numbers mean

Incogni says it sends automated requests to more than 420 data brokers, and it publishes the list on its blog. That list includes marketing, recruitment and risk brokers as well as people-search sites, which is the main difference between Incogni and services built around US people-search sites.

The people-search figure is where its own pages disagree. The help center says Incogni currently covers about 100 people-search sites, and only for US customers. The list on its blog, last updated in April 2026, tags far more entries than that as people-search sites. I cannot tell you which is current, so if people-search listings are your main worry, check the list for the sites you have actually found.

When I read that list, Whitepages, Spokeo, MyLife, FastPeopleSearch, TruePeopleSearch, Nuwber and PeopleFinders were on it. BeenVerified, Radaris and the PeopleConnect sites (Intelius, Instant Checkmate and TruthFinder) were not.

What Incogni cannot remove

• Public records. Its help center says it cannot process requests for court records, records on government websites, or publications about criminal proceedings and convictions, even through custom removals.
• Social media, blogs and forums. Also excluded on every plan.
• Google results. Nothing in the help center describes work on search results for Standard or Unlimited subscribers. Once the source page is gone, Google's own tools clear the leftover result; my piece on Google's Results about you tool walks through them.
• Sites outside the automated list, unless your plan includes custom removals.
• Listings that need you personally. Some sites act only after you verify by phone or email yourself, and Incogni will sometimes ask you to confirm a profile. Expect a few emails that need an answer.
• The dark web. Incogni's help center says that once data is there, removal is no longer realistic.

Custom removals depend on the plan

Incogni's plans are Standard, Unlimited, Family, Family Unlimited, Protect and Concierge. Standard and Family cover the automated list only. Custom removals, where you paste a link to a page showing your details and Incogni's privacy team works on it by hand, come with Unlimited, Family Unlimited, Protect and Concierge. One plan summary in the help center also lists custom requests under the plain Family plan, which contradicts the pricing page, so confirm before you buy.

The rules for custom requests, per its help center:

• You need the exact URL of the page with your information, not the site's home page or a search result.
• The team works on three of your links at a time, oldest first.
• Most are finished in 7 to 30 days; some take up to 60.
• Incogni says the feature reaches more than 3,000 sites beyond the automated list.

Protect adds identity theft insurance and credit monitoring from Coveron (formerly NordProtect). Concierge assigns a dedicated privacy specialist and is aimed at executives and public figures. For any plan, see the current price on its site.

What independent research says

Incogni was not part of Consumer Reports' 2024 study of people-search removal services. It was part of a peer-reviewed study, "Measuring the Accuracy and Effectiveness of PII Removal Services," presented at the 2025 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium by researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Brave, Imperial College London and Northwestern University.

The researchers paid for one month of four services (Incogni, Optery, Kanary and Mozilla Monitor) for 71 US residents, most of them students. Going by each service's own status reports after 30 days, Incogni had the highest average removal rate, at 76.6 percent of records per participant, against an average of 48.2 percent across the four. Most of its removals were logged within the first day and a half.

The same paper adds two caveats. The rates rest on the services' own statuses, not on independent checks of every site. And because Incogni does not show users the specific personal details in each record, the researchers could not check whether its records were really about the participants; across the services they could check, only 41.1 percent of records were. Young participants with short address histories may also be easier to clear than the average subscriber.

Cancelling and refunds

• Turn off renewal under Profile, then Subscription & billing, then Manage billing. You keep the service until the paid term ends.
• Incogni offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase, limited to one refund per customer. After 30 days, refunds are at its discretion.
• If you bought it through Surfshark or NordVPN, cancel and claim refunds with them.
• Deleting your account is a separate request through support, and it gives up any time left on the subscription.

Incogni or doing it yourself

If your concern is a stranger finding your address, the work that matters most is on a few dozen US people-search sites, and you can do it free. Our guide to removing your information from people-search sites has the routes in a sensible order, and the opt-out checklist keeps track of what you filed and when to look again. That route also covers BeenVerified, Radaris and the PeopleConnect sites, which Incogni's published list did not include.

Where Incogni earns its fee is the part you cannot see: hundreds of marketing and risk brokers with no public search, written to on a schedule under the law that applies where you live. Very few people would send those letters by hand. If you are choosing between it and the most familiar US alternative, I compared the two in DeleteMe vs Incogni.

Before you sign up

• Search for yourself on the big people-search sites and write down where you appear. That list is how you will judge the dashboard.
• Check Incogni's broker list for those sites. Anything missing is still yours to handle, or needs a plan with custom removals.
• Be ready to answer broker emails within a few days, since some requests stall without you.
• Note the date your 30-day refund window closes.
• Remember that you are giving one more company your date of birth, addresses and phone number. Incogni says it does not sell personal data (Deloitte checked that claim for 2024), keeps its systems mainly on EU-based infrastructure, and has completed a SOC 2 Type II examination.

Your next three steps

1. Run the free route first: the opt-out guide covers the big sites in an evening.
2. If you pay, keep the opt-out checklist anyway, for the sites a service does not cover.
3. Check what a service files against what DeleteMe and Incogni publish about their coverage before you choose.