SerpApi Moves to Dismiss Google DMCA Lawsuit Over SERP Scraping
The Development
SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss Google's DMCA lawsuit on February 20, 2026, challenging Google's legal standing to sue over scraping of publicly visible search results. Google had sued SerpApi in December 2025, alleging the company bypassed bot-detection systems, used rotating bot identities, and scraped licensed content from Search features—including images and real-time data—for commercial resale. SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy countered that the DMCA protects copyrighted works, not websites or ad businesses, and that Google doesn't own the underlying content displayed in its results. He argued that accessing publicly visible pages without decryption or login credentials cannot constitute DMCA circumvention. SerpApi also cited Google's own admission that its anti-bot systems protect its advertising business—not specific copyrighted works—as undermining the DMCA claim. The company invoked the Ninth Circuit's hiQ v. LinkedIn precedent against information monopolies and calculated that Google's interpretation of statutory damages would total $7.06 trillion, exceeding U.S. GDP. The case follows a separate Reddit lawsuit filed in October 2025 that also named SerpApi.
Our Take
Google's DMCA framing is a deliberate legal stretch, and SerpApi's motion exposes the seam. The DMCA was built to protect creative works from piracy—not to give a platform monopoly control over publicly rendered HTML. Google's own admission that SearchGuard protects its ad business, not copyrighted content, is a significant self-inflicted wound in this argument. The hiQ v. LinkedIn precedent is directly on point: courts have already rejected the logic that technical barriers to public data create legal access restrictions. But outcomes matter more than legal elegance. Marketing teams running competitive intelligence, rank tracking, or AI-assisted search analysis through third-party SERP APIs are operating on infrastructure that faces genuine legal uncertainty. Even a prolonged case—without a final ruling—forces platform risk reviews and contingency planning. The real stakes here are not SerpApi's survival but whether Google can use copyright law to wall off its index from independent analysis.
The Exploit
Action Item
If your martech stack pulls SERP data through a third-party API provider, audit that dependency now and identify a backup data source or direct Google API pathway before this case reaches a ruling that could trigger immediate service disruptions.