Google Sues SerpApi for Bypassing Security and Reselling Search Data

Google has taken SerpApi to court in what marks a significant escalation in the tech industry's battle over unauthorized data extraction. The complaint was filed December 19, 2025, in federal court, targeting the Austin-based company that has built its business around providing search result data to third parties.

The search giant alleges that SerpApi's scraping volume increased as much as 25,000 percent over the past two years, with the company now processing hundreds of millions of automated queries daily. According to the complaint, SerpApi uses deceptive techniques including bot networks, cloaking mechanisms, and constantly changing crawler identities to bypass Google's SearchGuard security system.

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 This practice directly undermines the licensing agreements Google maintains with content providers and violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to the lawsuit.

The legal action comes just two months after Reddit filed a lawsuit naming SerpApi, Perplexity, and others as defendants for similar scraping activities. SerpApi has defended its operations by arguing that public search data should remain accessible, framing its work as protected by the First Amendment.

Central to the lawsuit is Google's SearchGuard technology, a protection measure that launched in January 2025 after "tens of thousands of person hours and millions of dollars of investment". The system uses JavaScript challenges to distinguish human users from automated scrapers, but SerpApi allegedly developed circumvention methods almost immediately after deployment.

Google is seeking injunctive relief to halt SerpApi's operations entirely, along with statutory damages and the destruction of any technology involved in the violations. The company estimates SerpApi's annual revenue at just a few million dollars, while potential liability could reach astronomical levels given the scale of alleged violations.