Google filed a lawsuit on Friday against a Texas data scraping company, accusing the company of harvesting copyrighted content through hundreds of millions of fake Google search requests and stealing it "for free on an astonishing scale." The lawsuit against Serp Application Programming Interface (SerpApi) was filed by Google in California federal court. The complaint alleges that the company bypassed Google's data protection measures to steal content and resell it to third parties.
In October this year, Reddit also filed a similar lawsuit against Serpu API Company and other data scraping agencies, accusing them of stealing platform content to provide training support for the artificial intelligence search engine developed by artificial intelligence startup Perplexity. It’s worth noting that Perplexity was not named in Google’s lawsuit.
A spokesman for Serpe API did not immediately respond to the lawsuit's allegations.
Google General Counsel Halima Dillian Prado said in a statement: "We invest significant resources to combat this type of abuse and protect the content of sites in search results. When our technical security protections are so blatantly circumvented, filing legal action to stop this behavior is our last resort."
Google said its search results include authorized copyright content from other companies, covering knowledge panels, Google Maps, Google Shopping and many other services. The complaint states that these "high-quality, content-rich" search results make them a "highly targeted target" for Serp API and its customers.
Google asked the court to order the defendant to compensate an unspecified amount of economic losses and issue an injunction to prohibit the company from continuing to carry out data scraping.
The cause of the case is Google LLC v. Serp API LLC. The court hearing the case is the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, case number 5:25-cv-10826.