Feature
Key Takeaways
- Lawsuit Filed: Google filed suit against SerpApi in the US North District of California's District Court on Friday Dec 19, 2025 alleging circumvention of technical measures and trafficking in technology designed for circumvention of technological measures.
- Copyright circumvention alleged. SerpApi accused of bypassing security and reselling content.
- Impact on rightsholders. Website owners and content providers face unauthorized use of their data.
Google's lawsuit against scraping company SerpApi marks the latest escalation in the tech industry's intensifying battle over unauthorized data extraction and AI training content.
Google filed the lawsuit on Dec. 19th, alleging SerpApi circumvented security measures to extract copyrighted content from Google search results. According to Google, the legal action aims to stop SerpApi's bots and scraping activities that the company claims violate the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should access their content.
Google alleges SerpApi uses cloaking, large bot networks and fake crawler names to bypass security protections. The company asserts this unlawful activity "has increased dramatically over the past year."
Google claims SerpApi takes content that Google licenses from others, such as images in Knowledge Panels and real-time data in Search features, and resells it for a fee. The lawsuit follows similar legal actions by other websites against SerpApi and scraping companies.
Google's Exciting 2025
Google reversed course dramatically in 2025, with its stock rising 68% to reach a $3.8 trillion market cap that surpassed Microsoft. CEO Sundar Pichai instilled urgency through direct involvement in product and model reviews while implementing six-week launch sprints.
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3 family of models now rival, and in some cases surpass, Claude and ChatGPT atop performance leaderboards. The company launched thinking controls and pricing shifts for the Gemini 3 API in November 2025.
Google Cloud generated $15.15 billion in Q3 2025, a 35% year-over-year increase, with both Anthropic and OpenAI signing major deals to run workloads on Google's infrastructure. The company's $32 billion Wiz acquisition cleared U.S. DOJ antitrust review in November.
The Scraping Wars
AI companies' hunger for training data has triggered an escalating battle over unauthorized web scraping, content licensing and digital rights.
Technical & Infrastructure Strain
The scale of unauthorized scraping has grown dramatically. Since January 2024, bandwidth for multimedia downloads jumped 50%, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. Automated programs scraping image catalogues for AI models—not human visitors—drove the surge.
Traditional defenses have proven inadequate. Websites historically relied on robots.txt files to limit bot access, but many AI crawlers now ignore them. "Not all crawlers respect robots.txt," said Shayne Longpre, AI researcher and Data Provenance Initiative lead. "They don't have a legal obligation to do so."
Some bots actively obscure their identity to evade restrictions. Perplexity was found using stealth crawlers to bypass no-crawl directives.
Legal & Licensing Battles
Legal action has targeted unauthorized data extraction. Reddit sued Anthropic for scraping data to train large language models despite robots.txt blocks. Reddit argued Anthropic breached its terms of service and threatened the platform's data monetization plans.
Alleged Scraping Methods
Google's General Counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, alleged in a blog post Friday that SerpApi utilized the below methods — described as "shady back doors" — to violate Google's security measures and gain access to copyright protected materials.
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Cloaking | Disguising crawler identity to evade detection systems |
| Bot networks | Deploying large-scale automated programs to extract content |
| Fake crawler names | Using constantly changing identifiers to avoid blocking |
| Content resale | Extracting licensed content and selling it for a fee |
Damages and Relief Requested
In its prayer for relief, Google asks the Court for the following remedies:
Injunctive relief
An order barring SerpApi (and related parties) from (i) circumventing Google’s technological protections and (ii) manufacturing, offering, selling, or trafficking in tools designed to bypass Google’s security measures.
Destruction of violating technology
An order compelling SerpApi to destroy any technology or devices involved in violations of the DMCA.
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Statutory damages OR actual damages plus profits
Google may elect one of two options:
- Statutory damages under the DMCA of not less than $200 and up to $2,500 per violation for each act of circumvention or trafficking, or
- Actual damages and non-duplicative profits SerpApi earned from its unlawful conduct.
Additional relief
Google also seeks:
- Attorneys’ fees and costs under 17 U.S.C. § 1203
- Prejudgment and post-judgment interest
- Any further relief the Court deems appropriate.
