""Google is the largest scraper in the world," the company said in a blog post on Friday. "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal.""
""SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others (like images that appear in Knowledge Panels, real-time data in Search features and much more), and then resells it for a fee," said Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado when the lawsuit was announced. "In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in Search.""
SerpApi, a Texas-based web scraping company, asked a California court to dismiss Google's claim that SerpApi bypassed digital locks to collect copyrighted content appearing in Google Search results. Google filed suit in December 2025 alleging that SerpApi's scraping circumvents security measures and violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. §1201(a)(1)(A) and §1201(a)(2)). Reddit filed a related suit against other scrapers earlier. SerpApi argued that Google built its business on crawling public pages, while Google contends SerpApi copies content Google licenses and resells it, disregarding rights holders' directives. The key legal question is whether Google's protections qualify as technological protection measures.
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