Google has brought a lawsuit aimed at protecting its search results, targeting a company called SerpApi that turned Google’s famous 10 blue links into a commercial offering. Google says SerpApi flouts established law and Google’s terms by scraping and reselling its search engine results pages (SERPs). While this isn’t the first move against SerpApi, the company’s decision to sue a scraper could mark a tougher approach to defending its search data.
Services like SerpApi do meet a demand, but they operate in a legal gray area. Google doesn’t provide an official API for its search results, which draw on the world’s largest and most complete web index. That scarcity makes Google’s SERPs particularly valuable for AI. A chatbot can’t summarize links it can’t locate, which is why firms such as Perplexity have paid for SerpApi’s second-hand Google data. That activity led Reddit to sue SerpApi and Perplexity over harvesting its content from Google results.
Many of the points Google raises echo arguments Reddit made when it went public with its case earlier this year. The search company says its motives aren’t purely self-interested—it frames the action as also defending the sites it lists. In its blog post about the lawsuit, Google asserts SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.”
It’s notable that Google has a partnership with Reddit that feeds Reddit data directly into Gemini, so Reddit pages frequently appear in the chatbot’s responses. Google notes it follows “industry-standard crawling protocols” to gather the content that shows up on its SERPs, yet those sites didn’t consent to SerpApi scraping their material from Google. Thus, while one can argue the lawsuit defends web publishers’ rights, it also plainly serves Google’s own commercial interests.
