The fight over who owns search data just got serious. Google filed a federal lawsuit on December 19 against SerpApi, accusing the Texas company of deploying "shady back doors" to steal copyrighted content from search results — and the fallout could hit businesses and marketers where it hurts.
Google claims SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of fake search requests daily, using disguised bots that constantly change identities to slip past security systems. The scraping company then packages that data — including images from Knowledge Panels and real-time search features — and resells it to customers for a profit.
Here's what makes this different: Google's not just claiming a terms-of-service violation. The lawsuit invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), arguing that SerpApi actively circumvented SearchGuard, a protection system Google launched in January 2025. Under the DMCA, each violation carries penalties between $200 and $2,500 — which could theoretically add up to billions given the alleged scale of SerpApi's operations.
"We filed this suit to ask a court to stop SerpApi's bots and their malicious scraping, which violates the choices of websites and rightsholders," wrote Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google's General Counsel, in the company's announcement.
What this means for businesses: If Google wins, the ripple effects could be significant. SerpApi powers tools that SEO professionals and businesses use to track search rankings, monitor competitors, and measure marketing performance. Marketing teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi could find reliable search data harder to get or more expensive, according to industry observers.
The lawsuit echoes Reddit's October complaint against SerpApi and AI search companies, suggesting a coordinated push by major platforms to lock down their data. The twist? Google acknowledges SerpApi likely can't afford to pay the damages, with the company earning only millions annually while facing potential liability orders of magnitude higher.
For now, watch how your SEO tools perform. If they rely on scraped Google data, you might need backup plans. The broader question remains: In an AI-driven world where data is gold, who gets to mine the web — and at what cost?
Read Google's full court filing here