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Google says the lawsuit is its last resort.
Credit: Aurich Lawson
Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.
SerpApi and similar firms do fulfill a need, but they sit in a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which are based on the world’s largest and most comprehensive web index. That makes Google’s SERPs especially valuable in the age of AI. A chatbot can’t summarize web links if it can’t find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for SerpApi’s second-hand Google data. That prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity for grabbing its data from Google results.
Google is echoing many of the things Reddit said when it publicized its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it’s not just doing this to protect itself—it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post on the legal action, it says SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.”
It’s worth noting that Google has a partnership with Reddit that pipes data directly into Gemini. As a result, you’ll often see Reddit pages cited in the chatbot’s outputs. As Google points out, it abides by “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites didn’t agree to let SerpApi scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google’s lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also explicitly protects Google’s business interests.
Sudden interest
The kind of data scraping that SerpApi uses is not new—Google has simply put up with it until now. However, the company claims that SerpApi’s deceptive behavior, like spoofing user agents and hammering sites with armies of bots, has increased significantly over the past year. That may have something to do with the ever-growing hunger for search data in the AI era.
Google is coming out of its antitrust cases relatively unscathed so far, which affects the availability of its data. It has avoided the harshest remedies, like the government’s demand that Google offer search data to competitors. That might have turned businesses like SerpApi legit, but with that no longer an option, Google may feel emboldened to unleash the lawyers.
While Google paints this as a benevolent action, it stands to benefit by stopping SERP scrapers. However, this may make some of Google’s competitors happy, too. Since the search giant doesn’t offer an official API for search (and the courts declined to force the issue), SERP scraping provides a way for companies to get Google’s search data on the down-low. This reduces demand for the handful of other web indexes that do have APIs, including Brave and Bing. Without illicit search APIs, chatbots may have to lean on official data sources.
Credit: Aurich Lawson
Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.
SerpApi and similar firms do fulfill a need, but they sit in a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which are based on the world’s largest and most comprehensive web index. That makes Google’s SERPs especially valuable in the age of AI. A chatbot can’t summarize web links if it can’t find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for SerpApi’s second-hand Google data. That prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity for grabbing its data from Google results.
Google is echoing many of the things Reddit said when it publicized its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it’s not just doing this to protect itself—it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post on the legal action, it says SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.”
It’s worth noting that Google has a partnership with Reddit that pipes data directly into Gemini. As a result, you’ll often see Reddit pages cited in the chatbot’s outputs. As Google points out, it abides by “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites didn’t agree to let SerpApi scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google’s lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also explicitly protects Google’s business interests.
Sudden interest
The kind of data scraping that SerpApi uses is not new—Google has simply put up with it until now. However, the company claims that SerpApi’s deceptive behavior, like spoofing user agents and hammering sites with armies of bots, has increased significantly over the past year. That may have something to do with the ever-growing hunger for search data in the AI era.
Google is coming out of its antitrust cases relatively unscathed so far, which affects the availability of its data. It has avoided the harshest remedies, like the government’s demand that Google offer search data to competitors. That might have turned businesses like SerpApi legit, but with that no longer an option, Google may feel emboldened to unleash the lawyers.
While Google paints this as a benevolent action, it stands to benefit by stopping SERP scrapers. However, this may make some of Google’s competitors happy, too. Since the search giant doesn’t offer an official API for search (and the courts declined to force the issue), SERP scraping provides a way for companies to get Google’s search data on the down-low. This reduces demand for the handful of other web indexes that do have APIs, including Brave and Bing. Without illicit search APIs, chatbots may have to lean on official data sources.
