Google has officially filed a lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that provides tools for extracting web content, including Google search results, accusing it of large-scale and unauthorized scraping of copyrighted material. According to Google’s complaint, SerpApi employed deceptive and automated methods to access search results at an astonishing scale, then sold this data to clients without proper licensing. This practice, Google argues, violates copyright laws and undermines the company’s significant investments in content licensing and display rights.
The legal action comes shortly after Reddit also filed lawsuits in October against SerpApi and two other data extraction companies, accusing at least one of them of stealing content from Reddit to supply an AI startup. Although Google’s lawsuit references Reddit’s claims, it does not directly involve the AI startup or its bots. Instead, the focus is on SerpApi’s methods for bypassing Google’s anti-scraping technology, known as “Search Guard,” which is specifically designed to prevent automated access to search results.
Google emphasizes that its search results include a substantial amount of copyrighted content, ranging from images to text modules displayed across different search features. By making these results available to third-party services without paying licensing fees, SerpApi allegedly weakens Google’s investments in maintaining the legality of its content use. The company is now asking the court to issue an injunction preventing SerpApi from circumventing crawling restrictions and to destroy any associated technology used in these activities.
This case highlights ongoing tensions between tech giants and data extraction services, raising questions about copyright enforcement in the era of automated web scraping and AI-driven data consumption. Experts note that the outcome of this lawsuit could set a precedent for how companies protect digital content from large-scale automated access while balancing innovation in AI and data services.
