Google has escalated its battle against large-scale data scraping by filing a lawsuit against SerpApi, a Texas-based company it accuses of systematically siphoning content from its search results using massive volumes of fake queries, in what the tech giant describes as industrial-scale theft of copyrighted material.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday in federal court in California, alleges that SerpApi generated hundreds of millions of automated Google search requests to bypass Google’s technical safeguards, extract data embedded in search results, and then resell that information to third parties. Google argues that the practice allows SerpApi and its customers to “take it for free at an astonishing scale,” undermining both content creators and Google’s own contractual obligations to partners.
Google’s general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, said the company had little choice but to resort to legal action after other measures failed.
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“We devote significant resources to fighting this abuse and protecting websites’ content in our results,” she said in a statement. “When our technical security protections are circumvented in such a brazen way, as a last resort we take legal action to stop this behavior.”
At the heart of the dispute is the growing value of search data in the age of artificial intelligence. Google said its search results often include licensed and copyrighted material from third parties across products such as Knowledge Panels, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. These results, described in the complaint as “high-quality, content-rich,” are precisely what make Google a prime target for scrapers seeking structured data that can be repurposed for analytics, resale, or AI-related applications.
SerpApi did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. Google is seeking unspecified monetary damages as well as a court order to block SerpApi from continuing its scraping activities.
The case adds Google to a growing list of platforms pushing back against companies accused of harvesting online content without permission, a conflict that has intensified alongside the rapid expansion of generative AI. In October, Reddit filed a lawsuit against SerpApi and other scraping firms, alleging that its content was being taken to help train Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine. While Perplexity is not named in Google’s complaint, the overlap highlights how search data and user-generated content have become critical inputs in the AI ecosystem.
A Reddit spokesperson welcomed Google’s move, saying the company was “encouraged” by the lawsuit.
“When bad actors scrape content without permission or guardrails, they are turning the openness of the Internet against itself,” the spokesperson said.
For Google, the lawsuit also reflects broader strategic and legal pressures. The company sits at the center of the global information economy, aggregating and organizing vast amounts of data from across the web, often under complex licensing arrangements. Large-scale scraping threatens not only its infrastructure and revenue models, but also its relationships with publishers, map providers, and retailers whose content appears in search results under specific terms.
More broadly, the case underscores how the AI boom is reshaping old debates about web scraping, fair use, and data ownership. What was once a niche technical practice has become a high-stakes commercial activity, with companies racing to secure training data and real-time information at scale. Courts are increasingly being asked to draw lines between legitimate access, competitive intelligence, and outright misappropriation.
The lawsuit is titled Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 5:25-cv-10826. Its outcome could help set new boundaries for how far third-party firms can go in extracting value from search engines — and may shape how data flows across the internet as AI systems continue to proliferate.