Overview
- Google filed a civil complaint on December 19 accusing SerpApi of unlawfully scraping Google Search results by circumventing its SearchGuard protection.
- The complaint alleges SerpApi masked automated queries to look like human traffic using cloaking, large bot networks, shifting crawler identities, and “fake browsers” across many IP addresses.
- Google says the scraping captured third-party copyrighted and licensed material displayed within Search, such as images in Knowledge Panels and real-time data, which SerpApi then resold.
- The company is seeking a court injunction to stop the alleged circumvention and an order requiring the destruction of technology used for scraping.
- The case follows Reddit’s October suit against SerpApi and highlights a legal gray zone for scraping services that serve AI firms in the absence of an official Google Search API, with no court ruling yet reported.