Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results.
The allegations: Google said SerpApi:
- Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
- Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
- Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
- Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.
What Google is saying. “Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all,” Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping “brazen” and “unlawful.” Google said SerpApi’s activity “increased dramatically over the past year.”
Catch up quick. Google’s lawsuit similar legal action taken by Reddit, which named SerpApi, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy and accused them of scraping Reddit content through Google Search results while hiding their identities to bypass restrictions.
- Reddit licenses its data to Google and OpenAI, but alleges others tried to sidestep those deals.
- Reddit said it set a “trap” post visible only to Google’s crawler that later appeared in Perplexity results — evidence of scraping, according to the complaint.
- SerpApi denied wrongdoing and said it operates lawfully.
What SerpApi has said previously. SerpApi argued that “public search data should be accessible,” framing its work as protected by the First Amendment and warning that lawsuits like Reddit’s threaten the “free and open web.”
Why we care. If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both — especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.
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