Google Sues SerpApi
The lawsuit involves avoidance of Google’s anti-bot measures and copyright infringement.
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On December 19, 2025, Google announced that it was suing SerpApi, a service for scraping Google Search results.
SerpApi allows AI agents, search engine optimization tools, and other companies to programmatically access the search engine at scale. According to Google, the defendant has been making hundreds of millions of search requests per day.
Google’s claim hinges on two arguments:
- Circumvention of SearchGuard, a protection measure implemented in January 2025. This measure reinforces Google’s prohibition of web scraping in its terms of service and the robots.txt file. Circumventing it imposes a so-called “deadweight loss” which the platform is unable to offset with ads.
- Copyright infringement which allegedly stems from taking licensed content from Google’s Knowledge Panel, Maps, Shopping, and other properties without authorization or payment.
Google’s lawsuit relies on SerpApi violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the creation of tools to bypass technological measures protecting copyrighted works. DMCA is no joke because it may incur criminal liability; however, the legal doctrine is still underdeveloped when it comes to web scraping.
The tech giant claims that these infringements make it eligible for damages ranging between $200 and $2,500 for each count (in other words: every scraped page) – or at least the profits SerpApi has made from providing its services.
In addition, Google wants SerpApi to stop any further violations, and to destroy the circumvention technology which reportedly was purpose-built for the task.
SerpApi has drawn Google’s attention only now despite being in business since 2017. One of the reasons is likely scale: Google claims that the company’s search requests have increased by as much as 25 times over the past two years.
Another reason is the emergence of AI search agents that threaten to replace the dominant search engine. For example, ChatGPT’s own search product has been proven to use Google for answers.
This is a second major lawsuit in 2025 that features SerpApi. In October, Reddit sued the service (and several other companies) for extracting Reddit snippets from Google Search.
