• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Google is pressing to proceed with a lawsuit accusing the Texas-based company SerpApi of violating federal law by circumventing attempts to prevent it from scraping search results.

"SerpApi believes that it is entitled to vacuum up the content that Google pays to license, and sell that content to others," Google writes in papers filed Monday with U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California.

"Google has been and continues to be harmed by SerpApi’s misconduct, as it both undermines Google's extensive investment in and competitive advantage from the copyrighted content it licenses, and disrupts Google’s relationships with third party licensors," the company adds.

The battle between the companies dates to December, when Google accused SerpApi of having a "parasitic" business model that appropriates other services' content.

Google estimated in its complaint that it receives "hundreds of millions of artificial search requests each day" from SerpApi.

Google also said that in January 2025 it launched "SearchGuard" in order to prevent scraping by bots, but that SerpApi developed a workaround. According to Google, SearchGuard sends a JavaScript “challenge” to search queries from unrecognized sources; that challenge "calls upon the user’s browser to send Google a 'solve.'"

Google alleged that SerpApi used "fakery" to get around SafeGuard, such as by using "automated means to bypass CAPTCHAs."

"SerpApi routinely boasts of its circumvention of SearchGuard," Google alleged, referencing a January 17, 2025 blog post by SerpApi that outlined its strategy to counter to SearchGuard.

Google claims SerpApi's "fakery" violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits anyone from circumventing technological restrictions on copying.

SerpApi recently petitioned Rogers to throw out the case, arguing that the allegations regarding fakery, even if proven true, wouldn't show that it circumvented technological restrictions on copying.

"Google does not allege unscrambling or decryption of any work, or the impairment, deactivation, or removal of any access system," SerpApi wrote. "It only alleges that SerpApi 'solved' JavaScript challenges or CAPTCHAs or otherwise mimicked a human-controlled browser in ways that 'misled' Google into providing search results. But that is not the equivalent of breaking a lock or drilling through a wall to obtain a copy of a book."

SerpApi also says Google lacks "standing" to sue under the copyright law's anti-circumvention provisions, arguing that Google doesn't own a copyright interest in the material on the search results pages.

Google on Monday countered that SerpApi's alleged attempts to bypass SearchGuard's restrictions are "precisely the conduct" outlawed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlaws.

Google writes that SerpApi, on a daily basis, "sends Google hundreds of millions of automated queries through what it describes as 'fake browsers' designed to misrepresent itself and submits fraudulent 'solves' to SearchGuard challenges in order to get at the copyrighted content that SearchGuard protects."

Google also contends the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that outlaws bypassing technological restrictions authorizes lawsuits by anyone who is "injured by a violation," including non-copyright owners.

SerpApi is expected to respond to Google's arguments by May 6.

Reddit is separately suing SerpApi -- along with artificial intelligence company Perplexity -- for allegedly scraping content. That matter is pending in federal court in New York.