Google has filed a high-profile lawsuit against the search result scraping firm SerpApi, accusing the company of illegally harvesting and reselling data from Google’s search results pages (SERPs). The action marks a more aggressive legal posture by Google to protect its search data, licensed content, and the rights of publishers that depend on those results.
According to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Google alleges that SerpApi used advanced techniques to bypass its security systems, including hundreds of millions of automated queries and bot-like behavior, to extract copyrighted search content and resell it to customers. Google claims this practice violates both copyright law and its terms of service.
What Google Alleges SerpApi Did
Google’s lawsuit lays out several key claims, including that SerpApi:
Bypassed SearchGuard protections and other automated defenses designed to stop unauthorized scraping.
Sent vast volumes of automated queries that mimic human behavior, misrepresenting device, location, and browser information.
Extracted copyrighted content from search results — including snippets, images from Knowledge Panels, real-time data, and other licensed features — then resold structured SERP data through its commercial API.
Ignored website directives and industry-standard crawling controls that govern how content is accessed by automated tools.
Google argues that SerpApi’s activities impose costs on its infrastructure and undermine protections for content owners whose work is included in search results.
Legal and Industry Context
This lawsuit builds on earlier legal action against SerpApi and similar firms. In October 2025, Reddit sued SerpApi and others for scraping Reddit data from Google search results at scale to power AI tools like Perplexity. That case accused SerpApi of helping to funnel Reddit content into AI training pipelines without permission.
Unlike some past disputes focused primarily on terms-of-service violations, Google’s complaint emphasizes anti-circumvention and copyright infringement under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It alleges SerpApi developed methods specifically to defeat technological access controls and “traffic” in the circumvention of those safeguards.
Google is seeking monetary damages and a court order to stop SerpApi’s scraping operations, as well as requiring the destruction of technology used to circumvent protections.
Why This Lawsuit Matters
At a time when AI tools and search startups rely on structured web data, this case could reshape how third parties access and use search results. A ruling in Google’s favor might:
Reinforce copyright protections for search content and clarify legal risks for scrapers.
Force tools that depend on scraped results to shift toward authorized APIs or licensed data sources.
Influence how AI developers source real-time web information without violating access controls.
Set a precedent for enforcement actions against large-scale automated data collection that sidesteps platform protections.
Even companies that argue scraped data was publicly visible in a browser — including SerpApi itself — now face legal challenges to that assumption amid growing efforts by platforms to regain control over their data supply chains.