According to Reuters, Google filed a lawsuit on Friday, December 19, against a Texas data scraping company called SerpApi. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges SerpApi used hundreds of millions of fake Google search requests to bypass security and access copyrighted material. Google claims this was done to “take it for free at an astonishing scale” and then sell the scraped data to third parties. Google’s general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, stated the company takes legal action as a “last resort” to stop this behavior. SerpApi did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint. Google is seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages and a court order to block the scraping.
The bigger scraping war
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a Google problem. It’s part of a much wider legal and technological battle over who controls the data that makes up the modern web. Reddit actually sued SerpApi back in October, making similar allegations that the company was scraping its content to help train Perplexity’s AI search engine. A Reddit spokesperson said they were “encouraged” by Google’s lawsuit, framing the issue as bad actors turning the web’s openness against itself. So Google isn’t alone here. They’re just the latest, and arguably biggest, player to decide the courtroom is the next necessary front in the war against automated data harvesting.
Why Google results are a target
Google’s lawsuit points out something obvious but crucial: its search results are “high quality, content-rich.” That’s a polite way of saying they’re a condensed, valuable product made from licensed copyrighted content from other companies—stuff from Knowledge Panels, Maps, Shopping, and more. Scrapers like SerpApi aren’t just indexing the raw, open web. They’re trying to steal a finished product. They want the curated, structured data that Google has already assembled, which is far more valuable than random web pages. It’s basically trying to siphon off the final answer instead of doing the homework. And when you’re selling data access to clients, that finished product is exactly what they’re willing to pay for.
A last resort with high stakes
Google says litigation is a “last resort.” That’s probably true, but it’s also a sign that technical barriers alone aren’t working anymore. The company “devotes significant resources” to fighting this abuse, but when someone finds a way to simulate hundreds of millions of human searches, the cat-and-mouse game hits a new level. The stakes are huge. If companies can freely scrape and resell the compiled data from search engines, it undermines the entire economic and legal model of the service. Why would anyone license content to Google if it just gets vacuumed up and sold by a third party? This lawsuit is as much about protecting Google’s relationships with content providers as it is about protecting its own servers. It’s a foundational fight, not just a squabble over bandwidth.
