How to Report Phishing and Malicious Websites in Google Chrome

Google now makes it much easier to report “suspicious websites” in Chrome. Websites you might want to report include phishing websites, sites hosting malware, and similar bad things. Google will use these reports to block websites for everyone.

This new official browser extension reports bad websites to Google Safe Browsing. That’s a service used by web browsers like Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox to proactively block malicious websites. Whenever you visit a website, your web browser checks that it doesn’t match a list of known-bad sites and gives you a warning message if it does. Think of it like antivirus software with definitions—but it blocks bad websites.

You could previously report malicious websites by heading to Google’s Report Phishing Page form and entering the address of the website. You still can—but now there’s a Chrome extension that makes this much faster.

To use this it, install the Suspicious Site Reporter from the Chrome Web Store. After installing it, you can click the flag icon on your toolbar to report a bad website.

The extension will let you choose what to submit—the URL of the website and your IP address are mandatory, but you can also choose to share a screenshot of the page, the DOM content (all HTML of the site), and the referrer chain (which shows how you ended up on the suspicious site.)

Google can use these reports from Chrome users to proactively block these suspicious websites for everyone, hopefully making the web a better place.

The company released this Chrome extension on June 18, 2019. This feature goes hand-in-hand with other improvements against “deception” in Chrome, including warnings about confusing URLs like “go0ogle.com” in Chrome 75.