Google plans to continue its legal fight against SerpApi even after a federal judge dismissed key parts of its lawsuit against the search-results scraping company.
The case centers on SerpApi’s practice of collecting publicly available Google Search results and selling structured access to them through an unofficial search API.
Google argues that SerpApi unlawfully bypasses its anti-scraping protections to extract and resell content. SerpApi says it is accessing information that any person can view through a web browser.
The ruling does not completely end the case. However, it gives SerpApi an early victory in a broader dispute over who can collect, control and profit from information displayed on the public web.
Court Dismisses Google’s DMCA Claims
Google sued SerpApi in December 2025, accusing the company of sending hundreds of millions of automated search requests and bypassing a security system called SearchGuard.
SearchGuard is designed to identify and block automated tools that collect Google Search results at scale.
Google brought two claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that SerpApi circumvented a technological protection used to control access to copyrighted material appearing in search results.
On July 20, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss those claims.
The court permanently dismissed the parts of Google’s case involving search results that did not contain copyrighted material.
For search results containing copyrighted material, the court found that Google had not provided enough information showing that SearchGuard was implemented with authorization from the owners of that content.
Google was given 21 days to amend that part of its complaint without contradicting its original allegations.
That distinction matters because Google does not necessarily own all the content displayed inside Search.
Search results can contain licensed material from publishers and other businesses, including information shown in Knowledge Panels, Google Shopping and Google Maps.
Google may therefore need to demonstrate that the copyright owners authorized it to use SearchGuard as a protective measure on their behalf.
Google Is Not Giving Up
Despite the dismissal, Google has confirmed that it intends to revise its complaint and continue pursuing the case.
The company’s original position was that SerpApi was not merely reading public search pages. Google accused it of deliberately bypassing technical defenses and using automated queries to extract content at an enormous scale.
Google also argued that it spends significant resources protecting content appearing in its results and that legal action was necessary after its technical measures failed to stop the scraping.
The court did not reject every part of Google’s argument.
It found that Google had alleged enough facts to support an inference that SerpApi circumvented SearchGuard. The problem was whether Google had the legal authority required to bring its DMCA claims for content owned by third parties.
That leaves Google with a narrower path forward.
Instead of simply showing that SerpApi bypassed SearchGuard, the company may need to explain its agreements with publishers and prove that it was authorized to protect the copyrighted material appearing in its results.
SerpApi Calls The Ruling A Win For The Open Internet
SerpApi described the dismissal as a victory for developers, researchers, AI companies and other businesses that depend on access to public search information.
The company argues that publicly visible search results should not become legally restricted merely because Google places technical barriers around them.
SerpApi provides structured data from Google Search, Google Maps, Shopping, Images and other search features. Its service handles automated queries, proxies, CAPTCHA challenges and the process of converting results into data that applications can use.
Those capabilities make the company valuable to businesses building SEO tools, AI search products, monitoring systems and other applications that require current search data.
They also place SerpApi directly against Google’s interest in controlling how its search infrastructure is accessed.
The ruling gives scraping companies a stronger argument that technical access controls do not automatically turn public information into protected copyrighted material.
However, the case has not yet established a broad right to scrape any publicly accessible website. The decision focused on whether Google’s complaint contained enough facts to support its specific DMCA claims.
Reddit’s Related Scraping Case Moves Forward
The Google ruling arrived shortly before Reddit secured a different result in a related dispute.
Reddit has sued Perplexity AI, SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy, accusing the companies of improperly obtaining Reddit content through Google Search results.
Reddit claims the scraping companies circumvented protective measures to collect user posts and that Perplexity used the material for its AI-powered search service without a licensing agreement.
On July 31, a Manhattan federal judge rejected most of Perplexity’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit.
The judge allowed Reddit to continue pursuing its central claims against Perplexity and the scraping companies, although some secondary claims were dismissed.
SerpApi maintains that it accesses Google’s public results rather than scraping Reddit directly. Perplexity has also denied wrongdoing and says it will defend access to public online knowledge.
The different outcomes do not necessarily conflict.
The cases were filed in separate courts, involve different allegations and are at different stages. Still, they show how unsettled the law remains around automated access, copyright ownership and public web data.
AI Is Changing The Old Search Bargain
The fight extends beyond Google and SerpApi because AI is changing how information moves across the web.
Traditional search engines crawled websites, displayed links and sent visitors back to publishers. That traffic allowed websites to earn money through advertising, subscriptions, affiliate links and product sales.
AI search systems can provide complete summaries before users visit the original source.
Publishers may still provide the information that powers the answer, but receive fewer clicks in return.
That has encouraged website owners to reconsider how much access they should give search engines, AI crawlers and data-scraping companies.
Cloudflare now offers tools that let website owners identify, block or charge certain AI crawlers for access. Publishers can set different rules depending on whether a bot is indexing content for search, retrieving information for an AI agent or collecting material for model training.
These tools reflect a growing belief that online content should not automatically be available for unlimited machine use simply because it is visible to human visitors.
What Happens Next
Google can file an amended complaint addressing the weaknesses identified by the California court.
The revised filing will likely need to provide more detail about Google’s authority to use SearchGuard to protect copyrighted content owned by publishers and other third parties.
SerpApi can then challenge the amended claims through another motion to dismiss.
For now, the ruling gives SerpApi an important early win, but it does not settle the larger question of whether companies can freely scrape public search results after bypassing technical protections.
That question is becoming more urgent as AI companies compete for current information and publishers try to retain control over the content that makes those systems useful.
Google may have lost the first round, but its decision to continue the case suggests the legal fight over search scraping is only beginning.
Via: Ars Technica | Search Engine Land | Reuters | SerpApi
