Google filed a federal lawsuit on December 19, 2025, against SerpApi LLC in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The company claims SerpApi has been bypassing its SearchGuard protection system to scrape copyrighted content from search results at what Google calls an "astonishing scale."
The complaint focuses on DMCA anti-circumvention claims rather than the terms-of-service arguments that typically anchor scraping disputes. Google wants the court to shut SerpApi down and destroy its circumvention technology entirely.
The SearchGuard problem
Google deployed SearchGuard in January 2025 after investing what it describes as "tens of thousands of person hours and millions of dollars." The system sends JavaScript challenges to unrecognized queries, requiring browsers to prove requests come from actual humans rather than bots.
It worked, briefly. According to the complaint, SearchGuard initially blocked SerpApi from accessing Google's search results. But SerpApi's engineers moved fast.
SerpApi's founder Julien Khaleghy has described the workaround as "creating fake browsers using a multitude of IP addresses that Google sees as normal users." The company's own marketing materials promise customers they "don't need to care about" CAPTCHAs, bot detection, or IP blocking. Google alleges SerpApi achieves this through misrepresenting device information, spoofing locations, and syndicating legitimate authorization tokens across unauthorized machines worldwide.
Why Google cares about scraped search results
The lawsuit isn't really about search queries themselves. Google is framing this around the licensed content embedded in its search features: images in Knowledge Panels, product data in Shopping results, business photos in Maps. These come from agreements with content providers who expect some protection from mass extraction.
"SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others and then resells it for a fee," wrote Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google's General Counsel, in a blog post announcing the suit. She called SerpApi's business model "parasitic."
The timing here matters. Reddit sued SerpApi in October 2025 alongside Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy, using similar DMCA circumvention arguments. Reddit alleged these companies scraped its content through Google search results after being blocked from direct access, describing them as "similar to would-be bank robbers, who, knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead."
Can SerpApi survive this?
Google estimates SerpApi's scraping volume increased by 25,000% over two years, which sounds damning until you consider the AI data gold rush that drove it. Every generative AI company needs fresh web data, and companies like SerpApi became critical infrastructure for that supply chain.
But the math doesn't work in SerpApi's favor. The complaint notes statutory damages of $200 to $2,500 per violation. With hundreds of millions of alleged violations daily, the potential liability dwarfs SerpApi's reported revenue of "a few million dollars annually." Google acknowledges SerpApi can't pay and is seeking an injunction instead.
SerpApi has promised to "vigorously defend" the case, framing it as an attack on the "free and open web" and invoking First Amendment protections for accessing public data. The company has operated since 2017 without major legal challenges, though that was before platforms started treating scrapers as existential threats to their AI strategies.
For the SEO tools and AI applications that depend on SerpApi's data feeds, this lawsuit creates immediate uncertainty. If Google wins, one significant source of automated SERP access disappears. Larger vendors run their own collection systems, but smaller tools relying on third-party APIs face potential disruption.
Google's next court date hasn't been set. SerpApi still has its First Amendment defense and can argue SearchGuard functions as bot management rather than copyright protection, potentially falling outside DMCA scope. But fighting a multi-billion dollar company that explicitly wants to make an example of you is expensive, and VCs aren't exactly lining up to fund scraping lawsuits right now.
