Google's Copyright Lawsuit Against Web Scraper SerpApi Dismissed in Court

Google's attempt to use federal copyright law to shut down a web-scraping company just collapsed in court.

A judge granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss Google's lawsuit, ruling early in the case that Google lacked standing to sue under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to Ars Technica. The reasoning was simple: Google doesn't own the copyrighted content that shows up in its own search results, and it never proved it was acting on behalf of anyone who does.

What Google Actually Argued

Google sued SerpApi in December 2025, claiming the company circumvented Google's anti-scraping technology and then resold scraped search-result data through what Google called an unauthorized "Google Search API" product.

Google's theory, as described by Ars Technica, was that its anti-scraping measures existed to protect copyrighted material belonging to third parties, including partners who license content for Google's "knowledge panels." Google argued SerpApi's circumvention threatened those licensing relationships and let SerpApi profit off billions of bot-driven searches without paying for the infrastructure cost.

Search results themselves aren't copyrightable. Google was essentially asking a court to let it enforce copyright protections on behalf of content owners it never named and never showed it represented.

Reddit Went First

Google wasn't first out of the gate with this approach. Reddit filed a similar DMCA lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity AI back in October 2025, accusing the scraper of evading two layers of security: Reddit's own anti-scraping controls and Google's separate controls blocking scraped Reddit content from appearing in search results.

Google cited Reddit's lawsuit directly in a blog post announcing its own case, framing its lawsuit as a "last resort" against what it called "malicious scraping" that violated rights holders' ability to control who accesses their content.

A Legal Theory Public Interest Groups Call "Bizarre"

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit focused on digital rights, told Ars Technica that Google and Reddit are "sort of grasping at whatever tool is available" as AI scraping has exploded over the past three years.

Rose called the companies' use of the DMCA "bizarre" and said it's "not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case." The DMCA has historically been a fast, effective tool for stopping unwanted content use and forcing licensing negotiations, so reaching for it was a predictable move even if the legal fit was awkward.

The court apparently agreed the fit was bad. Rose noted that judges granting early motions to dismiss is uncommon. "That does not happen terribly often," she told Ars Technica, adding that the case "really boiled down to Google didn't allege enough about what it was protecting that was copyrighted."

The Underlying Fight Isn't Over

This dismissal doesn't settle the actual dispute driving these lawsuits: AI companies scraping search results and platform content at massive scale, often without paying the companies whose infrastructure and content they're built on.

Google and Reddit have both spent years building systems, content libraries, and licensing deals that AI scrapers can bypass essentially for free. A reasonable person can recognize the frustration here, even while agreeing the DMCA was the wrong tool for the job. Copyright law protects specific creative works, not a company's general interest in controlling access to its servers or business model.

SerpApi, for its part, appears to be framing the ruling as a broader statement about the open web. The company's public response, quoted in the Ars Technica headline, was blunt: "Google and Reddit do not own the Internet."

Google has confirmed it will keep fighting to block AI bots from scraping its search results, according to Ars Technica, meaning this specific court loss isn't the end of Google's broader anti-scraping campaign. Reddit's separate lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity remains pending. Whether either company pivots to a different legal theory, whether Google appeals the dismissal, and whether Reddit's case fares any better under the same DMCA standing problem are all open questions with no resolution yet on the record.