Google sues web scraper for sucking up search results ‘at an astonishing scale’

8 hours ago 11

Emma Roth

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Google has filed a lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that offers tools to scrape content on the web, including Google’s search results. SerpApi is accused of violating the Copyright Act by using “deceptive means” to automatically access and take Google’s search results “at an astonishing scale” before selling the data to customers.

Reddit also sued SerpApi, along with two other data scrapers, in October, accusing “at least one” of ripping content from its site for the AI startup Perplexity. Though Google’s complaint briefly mentions Reddit’s lawsuit against SerpApi, it doesn’t directly say anything about Perplexity or AI bots.

Google’s lawsuit claims SerpApi discovered a way around SearchGuard, a technology Google deployed earlier this year to block 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 argues that its search results include a “substantial” amount of copyrighted content, including images, which it displays on different modules within Search, like its Knowledge Panel. It alleges SerpApi “undermines” its investment in licenses to display copyrighted material by “making the content available to other services that need not incur similar costs.”

Google asks the court to order SerpApi to stop the company from circumventing its restrictions against scraping, as well as to destroy any technology involved in the process.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.