Google Takes Legal Action Against Web Scraper for Massive Data Harvesting of Search Results

Google has initiated legal action against SerpApi, a firm that provides tools for web content scraping, including Google’s own search results. The lawsuit accuses SerpApi of breaching the Copyright Act by employing “deceptive means” to gain automatic access to Google’s search results on a massive scale, subsequently selling this data to clients.

In October, Reddit also took legal steps against SerpApi and two other data scrapers, alleging that at least one of them extracted content from its platform for the AI startup Perplexity. While Google’s lawsuit briefly references Reddit’s case against SerpApi, it does not specifically mention Perplexity or AI bots.

According to Google, SerpApi found a way to bypass SearchGuard, a technology introduced earlier this year to prevent SerpApi from scraping its search results:

> In an effort to halt this harmful misappropriation and protect its partner relationships, Google developed and deployed a technological measure, known as SearchGuard, that restricts access to its search results pages and the copyrighted content they contain. So that it could continue its free riding, however, SerpApi developed a means of circumventing SearchGuard. With the automated queries it submits, SerpApi engages in a wide variety of misrepresentations and evasions in order to bypass the technological protections Google deployed. But each time it employs these artifices, SerpApi violates federal law…

> When SearchGuard launched in January 2025, it effectively blocked SerpApi from accessing Google’s search results and the copyrighted content of Google’s partners. But SerpApi immediately began working on a means to circumvent Google’s technological protection measure. SerpApi quickly discovered means to do so and deployed them.

> SerpApi’s answer to SearchGuard is to mask the hundreds of millions of automated queries it is sending to Google each day to make them appear as if they are coming from human users. SerpApi’s founder recently described the process as “creating fake browsers using a multitude of IP addresses that Google sees as normal users.”

Google contends that its search results contain a “substantial” amount of copyrighted content, including images, which it showcases in various modules within Search, such as the Knowledge Panel. The company claims that SerpApi “undermines” its investment in licenses for displaying copyrighted material by “making the content available to other services that need not incur similar costs.”

Google is seeking a court order to prevent SerpApi from bypassing its scraping restrictions and to mandate the destruction of any technology used in this process.