• by Laurie Sullivan , December 22, 2025

Google has filed a lawsuit against a Texas-based company it accuses of extracting large amounts of data from its search results, claiming the practice undermines protections around copyrighted material.

The complaint, lodged on Friday in federal court in California, targets SerpApi, a company that offers tools to collect and structure search engine results.

Google alleges that SerpApi generated hundreds of millions of artificial search queries to gain access to content embedded in Google’s results and then resold that information to third parties, according to Reuters.

It did so by circumventing Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls, ignoring website directives specifying whether content can be accessed, and took licensed content like real-time data and images to sell for profit from search features.

Google is also accusing the company of using cloaking, as well as rotating bot identities and large bot networks to scrape content.

The lawsuit argues Google’s search pages, which incorporate licensed material across products such as Knowledge Panels, Google Maps, and Google Shopping, are attractive to scrapers because of their depth and quality, according to Reuters.

SerpApi denies the allegations and said it plans to contest the case.

“The information we provide is the same information any person can see in their browser without signing in,” the company said in a statement. “We believe this lawsuit is an effort to stifle competition from the innovators who rely on our services to build next-generation AI, security, browsers, productivity, and many other applications.”

“We devote significant resources to fighting this abuse and protecting websites’ content in our results,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told Reuters 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.”

The case is similar to separate legal action brought by Reddit in October, in which the social media platform accused SerpApi and other data-scraping firms of improperly taking its content to support artificial intelligence development.

The case is 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.