Google filed a federal lawsuit towards SerpApi LLC on December 19, 2025, alleging the Texas firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing SearchGuard protections to scrape copyrighted content material from search outcomes. The irony runs deep. Google, which scrapes billions of net pages throughout the web for synthetic intelligence coaching and search indexing, now calls for authorized safety towards firms that scrape its personal search outcomes pages.

The 13-page grievance, filed in the US District Court docket for the Northern District of California below case quantity 25-10826, seeks statutory damages between $200 and $2,500 for every act of circumvention. SerpApi processes tons of of thousands and thousands of automated queries each day, creating probably astronomical legal responsibility figures. But Google’s personal crawling operations dwarf this scale by orders of magnitude, accessing just about each publicly out there net web page to energy search companies and prepare AI fashions that more and more preserve customers inside Google’s ecosystem quite than directing them to writer web sites.

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The lawsuit creates putting parallels to occasions from February 2014, when Matt Cutts, then Google’s head of net spam, publicly requested examples of scraper websites outranking authentic content material. Dan Barker, a search advertising skilled, responded by highlighting Google’s own Knowledge Panels that displayed content scraped from Wikipedia with almost equivalent textual content and formatting. “I feel I’ve noticed one, Matt. Observe the similarities within the content material textual content,” Barker wrote on February 27, 2014, accompanied by screenshots exhibiting Google’s search outcomes functioning as an enormous scraper website.

Quick ahead to December 2025, and Google positions itself as sufferer quite than practitioner of large-scale scraping operations. The grievance emphasizes Google’s funding in SearchGuard, a technological safety measure deployed in January 2025 after “tens of hundreds of individual hours and thousands and thousands of {dollars} of funding.” SearchGuard sends JavaScript challenges to look queries from unrecognized sources, requiring browsers to transmit particular data proving requests originate from human customers quite than automated methods.

But whereas Google builds technological partitions round its personal search outcomes, the corporate continues extracting huge portions of content material from publishers worldwide for synthetic intelligence functions. Penske Media Company filed a complete federal antitrust lawsuit towards Google on September 12, 2025, alleging the search large “systematically coerces on-line publishers into offering content material for synthetic intelligence methods with out compensation whereas concurrently decreasing web site visitors that publishers rely upon for income technology.”

The 101-page Penske Media complaint describes an not possible selection dealing with publishers. They need to both enable their content material for use for coaching and grounding AI fashions with out cost, or face exclusion from search outcomes that drive substantial parts of their income. “This motion challenges Google’s abuse of its adjudicated monopoly in Common Search Companies to coerce on-line publishers like PMC to produce content material that Google republishes with out permission in AI-generated solutions that unfairly compete for the eye of customers on the Web,” in line with the grievance’s opening assertion.

Google’s scraping operations for AI coaching prolong far past what SerpApi allegedly extracts from search outcomes. The European Fee launched a proper antitrust investigation on December 9, 2025, analyzing whether or not Google violated EU competitors guidelines by utilizing content material from net publishers and YouTube creators for synthetic intelligence functions with out applicable compensation or viable opt-out mechanisms. Brussels regulators will assess whether or not Google imposed unfair phrases on publishers and content material creators whereas granting itself privileged entry to coaching knowledge that opponents can not receive.

Based on the Fee’s announcement, Google might have used writer content material to energy AI Overviews and AI Mode options on search outcomes pages with out compensation. Google’s “Google-Prolonged” controls, launched in September 2023, purportedly enable publishers to forestall content material utilization for AI coaching. Nonetheless, these controls present inadequate granularity and exclude key merchandise, in line with the Penske Media lawsuit. Publishers who try to dam AI coaching by way of technical means like robots.txt recordsdata face visitors penalties that make such blocking economically untenable.

The financial imbalance Google creates by way of its scraping practices is stark. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince revealed during a CNBC interview on Could 21, 2025, that Google beforehand despatched one customer for each two pages crawled from web sites ten years in the past. Six months in the past, this ratio had deteriorated to at least one customer for each six pages scraped. At the moment, the ratio reaches 15 pages scraped per customer despatched to authentic sources. Publishers bear infrastructure prices for content material creation, internet hosting, and bandwidth whereas Google extracts worth by way of AI coaching and zero-click searches that preserve customers inside Google’s ecosystem.

Analysis analyzing 300,000 key phrases discovered that AI Overviews cut back natural clicks by 34.5 % when current in search outcomes, in line with evaluation revealed by Ahrefs. But when requested throughout a December 15, 2025 podcast interview whether or not publishers ought to view their content material otherwise for AI search, Nick Fox, Google’s SVP of Data and Info, responded with an unequivocal “no” and rejected proposals for standardized licensing offers that might enable smaller publishers to barter truthful compensation.

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In the meantime, SerpApi founder Julien Khaleghy established the Austin-based firm in 2017 after concluding that “scraping pictures from Google was an intensive course of,” in line with Google’s grievance. The enterprise mannequin facilities on appropriating output from companies that invested considerably to generate it, then delivering that content material to 3rd events by way of paid subscription tiers. SerpApi advertises its “Google Search API” as a solution to “Scrape Google,” with specialised companies focusing on Data Graph blocks, Google Procuring listings, and Google Maps knowledge.

Google estimates SerpApi sends tons of of thousands and thousands of synthetic search requests every day, with quantity growing as a lot as 25,000 % over the previous two years. The automated queries devour substantial computing assets with out producing income offset. Google’s Phrases of Service Settlement expressly forbids automated entry to look content material “in violation of the machine-readable directions on our net pages (for instance, robots.txt recordsdata that disallow crawling, coaching, or different actions).”

The grievance describes how SerpApi developed circumvention strategies instantly after SearchGuard’s January 2025 deployment successfully blocked the corporate’s entry. Khaleghy lately characterised the method as “creating faux browsers utilizing a mess of IP addresses that Google sees as regular customers.” These methods contain misrepresenting machine data, software program particulars, or location knowledge when responding to SearchGuard challenges, or syndicating reliable authorizations throughout unauthorized machines worldwide.

SerpApi boldly markets these circumvention capabilities, promising clients they “need not care about … captcha, IP deal with, bots detection, sustaining user-agent, HTML headers, [or] being blocked by Google.” The corporate claims to make use of “superior algorithms to bypass CAPTCHAs and different anti-bot mechanisms, making certain uninterrupted and environment friendly knowledge extraction.” A latest SerpApi weblog publish defined that SearchGuard had made net scraping “tougher,” however claimed the corporate was “lucky to be minimally impacted” as a result of its companies had “already pre-solved Google’s JavaScript problem.”

The lawsuit represents the second main authorized motion towards SerpApi in 2025. Reddit sued SerpApi on October 22, 2025, together with Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI, for circumventing each Reddit’s anti-scraping measures and Google’s SearchGuard system to scrape Reddit content material from Google search outcomes pages. That 41-page grievance described defendants as “much like would-be financial institution robbers, who, understanding they can’t get into the financial institution vault, break into the armored truck carrying the money as a substitute.”

The scraping controversy unfolds amid broader business tensions over content material entry and AI coaching knowledge. Over 80 media executives gathered in New York throughout the week of July 30, 2025, below the IAB Tech Lab banner to deal with what many contemplate an existential risk to digital publishing. Mediavine Chief Income Officer Amanda Martin joined representatives from Google, Meta, and quite a few different business leaders in confronting AI firms that scrape writer content material with out consent or compensation. Notably absent from the gathering have been the AI firms on the heart of the controversy: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity.

Publishers more and more view unauthorized AI coaching knowledge assortment as an existential risk. Analysis knowledge offered confirmed over 35 % of high web sites now block OpenAI’s GPTBot, whereas HUMAN Safety documented 107 % year-over-year will increase in scraping assaults. TollBit analysis demonstrated AI dependency on contemporary, human-generated content material to take care of accuracy and keep away from hallucinations, with 2 million scrapes per website and 117 % AI bot visitors surge reflecting heavy reliance on writer content material for coaching and real-time data retrieval.

One publishing firm earned simply $174 from AI crawlers over an prolonged interval, in line with knowledge revealed on November 20, 2025. The meager income highlights a elementary imbalance: whereas AI firms together with Google scrape thousands and thousands of pages to coach fashions and energy reply engines, publishers obtain minimal compensation regardless of bearing the prices of content material creation, internet hosting, and bandwidth. Some giant retailers together with Vox Media, Axel Springer, and Individuals Inc. have signed licensing offers to be used of their knowledge, however the overwhelming majority of internet sites have obtained no cost in alternate for AI corporations utilizing their content material.

Google’s grievance towards SerpApi alleges violations of Part 1201(a)(1)(A) of the Copyright Act, which prohibits circumventing technological measures controlling entry to copyrighted materials. Every circumvention act carries statutory damages between $200 and $2,500. Moreover, Part 1201(a)(2) violations stem from manufacturing, providing, offering, or trafficking in companies designed to avoid technological measures. The lawsuit acknowledges that SerpApi reportedly earns “just a few million {dollars} in annual income, however already faces legal responsibility that’s orders of magnitude increased and rising” with tons of of thousands and thousands of further violations on daily basis.

Central to Google’s authorized argument is that SearchGuard qualifies as a technological measure that “successfully controls entry” to copyrighted works. Google licenses copyrighted content material particularly to reinforce search outcomes by way of Data Panels displaying high-resolution pictures, Google Procuring that includes merchant-supplied product pictures and descriptions, and Google Maps incorporating varied terrestrial photos and business-supplied imagery. The grievance consists of an instance of a Willie Mays {photograph} that Google obtained below copyright license.

But publishers argue Google applies basically completely different requirements to its personal scraping operations. Recipe creators confronted Google in December 2025 over AI options displaying full recipes with errors, plagiarized content material, and stolen images with out correct attribution. Adam Gallagher, co-founder of Impressed Style, detailed particular issues affecting recipe publishers in a LinkedIn alternate with Nick Fox on December 2. “We wish to level out that we’re nonetheless seeing branded searches for us and a number of recipe websites with full plagiarized recipes riddled with errors, utilizing our images,” Gallagher wrote.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive aid compelling SerpApi to stop circumventing technological measures and destroying any know-how concerned in Part 1201 violations. Google requests statutory damages for every of SerpApi’s violations, or alternatively Google’s precise damages and SerpApi’s income. The grievance emphasizes that “SerpApi’s statutory violations are ongoing and are inflicting Google irreparable hurt as a result of SerpApi will be unable to pay the damages it’ll owe for its misconduct.”

Google’s place as each aggressive scraper of net content material and litigious defender of its personal search outcomes creates tensions all through the digital publishing ecosystem. The corporate’s SearchGuard funding protects copyrighted content material Google licenses from third events, but Google’s personal AI coaching operations extract much more worth from publishers than SerpApi may ever scrape from Google’s search outcomes pages. Publishers who rely upon search visibility for income can not realistically block Google’s AI crawlers with out dealing with existential visitors losses, whereas Google deploys refined technological and authorized mechanisms to forestall related scraping of its personal content material.

The lawsuit issues for the advertising neighborhood as a result of it exposes asymmetrical energy dynamics in content material distribution. Google controls 89.2 % market share normally search companies, rising to 94.9 % on cellular units, in line with federal courtroom findings referenced within the Penske Media grievance. This dominance creates a “monopsony” place the place Google controls writer entry to look referral visitors whereas concurrently extracting their content material for AI coaching with out truthful compensation.

Technical particulars about how Google circumvents writer preferences seem all through the Penske Media grievance. The lawsuit examines Bard, Gemini, Search Generative Expertise, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. These merchandise depend on giant language fashions educated on huge textual content corpuses scraped from writer web sites. “The coaching course of for Google’s LLMs entails storing encoded copies of the coaching works in laptop reminiscence, repeatedly passing them by way of the mannequin with phrases masked out, and adjusting the parameters to reduce the distinction between the masked-out phrases and the phrases that the mannequin predicts to fill them in,” the grievance explains.

Publishers face what the Penske Media grievance characterizes as a “Hobson’s selection” between permitting Google to make use of their content material for AI methods or dropping search visibility completely. Google’s robots.txt directions prohibit automated scraping of search outcomes, but Google’s personal crawlers extract content material from writer web sites at unprecedented scale. The double normal turns into obvious when analyzing enforcement: Google recordsdata lawsuits towards firms scraping its search outcomes whereas concurrently dealing with EU antitrust complaints over utilizing writer content material with out applicable compensation or viable opt-out mechanisms.

The SerpApi lawsuit follows Google’s sample of defending its personal pursuits by way of technological and authorized means whereas sustaining aggressive content material extraction from publishers who lack related recourse. Google eliminated the num=100 parameter on September 14, 2025, basically reworking how instruments entry search consequence knowledge by forcing 10 separate requests as a substitute of 1 to retrieve 100 outcomes. When SerpApi developed a workaround retrieving 100 natural outcomes by way of its Gentle Quick API, Google blocked that technique as nicely, proscribing the service to simply three outcomes.

Google’s authorized technique differs from earlier scraping disputes by emphasizing copyright safety by way of DMCA provisions quite than contract violations or phrases of service breaches. The framework offers statutory damages that might theoretically exceed SerpApi’s skill to pay given the large variety of alleged violations. This method might set up precedent for platform safety measures whereas Google continues extracting writer content material for AI coaching below completely different authorized theories that publishers problem by way of antitrust litigation and regulatory complaints.

The timing of Google’s lawsuit towards SerpApi coincides with intensifying regulatory scrutiny of knowledge scraping practices and mounting authorized stress from publishers. Amazon blocked AI bots from main tech firms in August 2025, updating its robots.txt file to ban crawlers from Meta, Google, Huawei, Mistral, and different know-how corporations. The e-commerce large maintains a $56 billion promoting enterprise constructed round customers searching its market, with third-party AI instruments that bypass Amazon’s storefront probably undermining each web site visitors and promoting income streams.

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Abstract

Who: Google LLC filed the lawsuit towards SerpApi LLC, a Texas-based firm based by Julien Khaleghy in 2017 that gives automated net scraping companies by way of API subscriptions. Google itself operates because the web’s largest scraper, extracting billions of net pages for search indexing and AI coaching whereas dealing with separate antitrust lawsuits from Penske Media Company and regulatory investigations from the European Fee over unauthorized writer content material utilization.

What: The lawsuit alleges SerpApi violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing Google’s SearchGuard technological safety measures to scrape copyrighted content material from search outcomes pages, processing tons of of thousands and thousands of automated queries each day by way of methods together with creating faux browsers, misrepresenting machine data, and syndicating authorizations to bypass safety challenges. In the meantime, Google scrapes writer content material at far better scale for AI coaching, with Cloudflare knowledge exhibiting Google now scrapes 15 pages per customer despatched to authentic sources in comparison with one customer for each two pages crawled a decade in the past.

When: The grievance was filed December 19, 2025, following SearchGuard’s January 2025 deployment and SerpApi’s speedy growth of circumvention methods, whereas Google’s personal AI scraping operations have accelerated dramatically all through 2025 with AI Overviews decreasing writer visitors by 34.5 % in line with Ahrefs evaluation.

The place: The case was filed in the US District Court docket for the Northern District of California as case quantity 25-10826, focusing on SerpApi’s operations from Austin, Texas that have an effect on Google’s Mountain View, California operations, whereas Google’s AI scraping impacts publishers globally together with those that filed the September 12, 2025 Penske Media antitrust lawsuit and triggered the December 9, 2025 European Fee investigation.

Why: Google seeks to guard copyrighted content material licensed from third events that seems in Data Panels, Google Procuring, and Google Maps options whereas stopping unauthorized appropriation that undermines content material partnerships and imposes infrastructure prices, but the lawsuit exposes elementary contradictions in Google’s place as each aggressive scraper of writer content material for AI coaching with out sufficient compensation and litigious defender of its personal search outcomes by way of DMCA provisions that publishers can not equally invoke towards Google’s scraping operations because of the firm’s 89.2 % search monopoly energy.


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