Google sued SerpApi over Copyright - and it is a bad joke

Key Takeaways:

• Google sued SerpApi for scraping search results and selling the data over copyright and the fact

  SerpApi’s answer to SearchGuard is to mask the hundreds of millions of automated queries it is sending to Google each day to make them appear as if they are coming from human users

• SerpApi is used by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other LLM chats for grounding there results as well as by Search Analytics Tools, Apple, Meta aso,

• After removing the num=100 parameter in September to disable competitors to ground on scale Google now drops the next bomb

• After Google introduced AI Overviews and AI Mode, rewriting scraped content from the web, the Helpful Content Update criticized to kill small publishers, it sounds like a ridiculous joke that they're now trying to claim copyright when they get scraped

• Simultaneuosly Google's partner Reddit is sueing SerpApi and Perplexity

• Some comments:

  • de Wulf:

    Biggest web scraping company in the world is suing a web scraping company for web scraping its content obtained through web scraping.

  • King:

    Translation: Despite all this AI, compute, and a thousands of the world's PhD computer scientists, we can't beat this small team of scrapers that are selling data to OpenAI, so we're gonna sue them to oblivion. Have a good holiday, y'all

  • Kronenberg:

    This likely hits far beyond SerpApi: a lot of SEO tools rely on the same SERP data supply chain, so the collateral damage could be real. Will we still have SERP data in 2026 the way we’re used to, or will it become scarcer, noisier, and more expensive?

  • I also want to point out that Google has been ordered to share search data with rivals in its Antitrust case. This was just a few weeks ago. SerpApi should sue back right away!

  • McQuaker: SERPAPI got caught giving their data to the wrong person - giving it to marketers that feed the engine of Google = Google will turn a blind eye. Give it to a new competing technology = lawsuit. Google doesnt care if SERP API goes out of business because another will rise, but if they can shut down OpenAI, thats a longer term victory. The dark beast rises again and it fights on all levels.

  • Sovic:

    Just… Pathetic. Shame on you Google

Sources:

• https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/serpapi-lawsuit/

• https://x.com/glenngabe/status/2002376867748425865

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aleyda_google-is-suing-serpapi-we-did-this-activity-7407856137896689667-WakS/

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-groberman-173847333_reddit-just-sued-perplexity-and-a-bunch-of-activity-7407183734514356224-srFA/

• https://x.com/CyrusShepard/status/2002470348470829205

• https://x.com/PierreDeWulf/status/2002438447827468347

• https://x.com/iPullRank/status/2002144724992602559

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevinindig_google-is-suing-serpapi-for-scraping-search-activity-7408039850651688961-InGy/

• https://x.com/Marie_Haynes/status/2002119352259350657

• https://serpapi.com/