How to see who responded to a Google Form

Last updated September 2026 · ~8 minute read

Short answer: usually you cannot, and the reason is not a missing menu. A Google Form does not record who answered unless you switched something on before they answered. Google says so plainly on its Publish & share your form page, in a tip about making people sign in: “Their usernames won't be recorded unless you turn on the ‘Responses’ setting to collect email addresses.” Sign-in and identity are two different things.

So the useful version of this question is really two questions. Is identity being recorded on new responses — and is there any way to get it for the ones already sitting in the Responses tab? The first has a three-click answer. The second, for a genuinely anonymous form, has none.

The setting that records identity

Google calls it Collect email addresses, and it is no longer the simple on/off checkbox that older tutorials describe. It is now a choice between three values. Google's Forms API reference spells all three out, along with which one your account starts on:

Read the defaults carefully, because they are the whole story for most people asking this question. A form built on a personal @gmail.com account starts at Do not collect. A form built on a work or school Workspace account starts at Verified and has probably been quietly recording addresses all along.

To change it, Google's View & manage form responses page gives the path: open the form, click Settings, click the Down arrow next to “Responses,” then under “Collect email addresses” select Verified or Responder input.

One wording note, since it trips people up when they search: that same help page uses two different labels for the manual option. The instructions say Responder input; the “Send response receipts” section a few paragraphs later says Responder entry. The API enum is RESPONDER_INPUT. They are the same setting.

Verified and Responder input are not equally trustworthy

Verified takes the address from the signed-in Google Account, so a respondent cannot type somebody else's name into it — but it also means nobody without a Google account can submit at all, and Google warns that “Respondents must confirm their Google Account email address gets collected with their response. The confirmation displays on each page of the form.”

Responder input is just a text field. It works for anyone, and it is worth exactly as much as the honesty of the person filling it in. For a staff attendance log that matters; for a newsletter sign-up it does not.

Turning it on today tells you nothing about yesterday

This is the part that disappoints people, so let us be precise about what is documented and what is not. Google does not state anywhere on its help pages that the setting is non-retroactive. On that specific question the documentation is silent. The following is therefore an inference from how Google stores the data — but it is a well-grounded one.

The identity is not a property of the form. It is a property of each individual response. Google's API reference describes the field as “Output only. The email address (if collected) for the respondent”, and it lives on the response object, next to that response's timestamp and answers. The form-level setting only decides whether that field gets populated at the moment somebody hits submit.

A response that arrived while the form was set to Do not collect was therefore written to storage with no address on it. Flipping the setting afterwards changes what future submissions record; it does not reach back and fill in a field that was never captured. Treat the change as effective from the next submission onward, and treat everything above the line as permanently anonymous.

The other route: restrict the form to your organisation

If you are on Google Workspace there is a second way to know who is answering: limit who is allowed to answer in the first place. Google's publish flow lets an owner “restrict the access to a domain, trusted audience, or group of users.” Combined with verified collection, you get a response set that can only have come from people inside your organisation.

This needs a work or school account — there is no organisation behind a personal Gmail address, so there is no audience to restrict to. We cover the full setup, the Workspace requirement and what it does and does not prevent in how to restrict a Google Form to one domain, so we will not repeat it here.

Where you actually read the names

Once identity is being collected, there are two places to look, and they suit different jobs.

The Individual view, for one person at a time

In the Responses tab, the third view is Individual. Google's description of it is “Find answers by person or, if you allowed people to submit the form more than once, by submission” — which is exactly the job here. You page through one submission at a time with Previous and Next, with the collected address shown against it.

It is worth noticing what Google does not say. The neighbouring Question view gets steps but no descriptive sentence at all on that help page; only Individual is documented as the by-person view. If you are hunting for a name, that is the tab.

The linked spreadsheet, for the whole list

For anything involving more than a handful of people, send the responses to a sheet instead: Responses → Link to Sheets. Collected addresses arrive as their own column next to the timestamp, which is what makes sorting, filtering and comparing against a roster possible at all. Download responses (.csv) from the same menu gets you the same columns as a file.

Doing this from an iPhone

All of the above assumes the desktop web editor. Form+ puts the same settings panel and the same three response views on your phone, against your real Google Forms on your own account:

• Open the form, tap Settings, and find Collect email addresses under Responses.
• Switch to the Responses tab and use the Summary | Question | Individual tabs to page through submissions one person at a time.
• Use Export to Sheets or Export responses to get the address column out as a spreadsheet, CSV or Excel file.
• If someone asks what you hold on them, Find a person's data (GDPR) searches your responses by email address or by any answer text and exports what it finds for that one person.

When the answer is simply no

An anonymous form whose responses are already in — a suggestion box, an unsigned staff survey, a feedback link posted publicly — cannot be de-anonymised. Not through a hidden Forms setting, not through the linked sheet, not through Drive version history, and not by any third-party app, ours included. The field was never written. There is nothing to read.

Google does log a timestamp on every response, and people sometimes hope to work backwards from it. Treat that as a dead end and, more importantly, as a bad idea: cross-referencing timestamps against who was in the room defeats the anonymity you promised, and if you promised it in the form's own description you have a problem beyond the missing column.

If the real question is “who hasn't responded yet”

That is a different job, and Google Forms has no built-in non-responder report — there is no list of invitees for it to compare against. You have to supply the named list yourself, which means designing for it before you send:

1. Verified collection plus a roster. Turn on Verified, export to Sheets, and compare the address column against your list of people. This is the only route where the names are trustworthy.
2. A required identifying question. No Workspace account needed — add a required name, employee number or student ID question. It is self-reported, so it identifies cooperative people, not evasive ones.
3. Send it individually. One link per person, sent one at a time, and track who replied on your side. Clumsy, but it works on any account and survives people answering from a phone they are not signed in on.

All three share a property worth stating outright: they are decisions you make before collecting responses. There is no version of this you can bolt on afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Can I find out who answered an anonymous Google Form?

No. Google's API reference describes the respondent's email as an “Output only” field holding the address “if collected”, stored on each individual response. If the form was not collecting identity when a response arrived, that response carries none — and there is nothing in Forms, Sheets or Drive to recover it from.

Does turning on Collect email addresses show me past respondents?

It should not be expected to. Google does not state this either way on its help pages, but the identity is stored per response and captured at submission, so a response submitted before you changed the setting has no address on it. Treat the change as effective from the next submission onward.

How do I see who has not responded to my Google Form yet?

Google Forms has no built-in list of non-responders. You need a named list of your own to compare against — verified email collection, a form restricted to your organisation, or a required identifying question checked against your roster.