SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

SerpApi, a Texas-based web scraping company, has asked a California court to dismiss Google's claim that that it bypassed digital locks to gather copyrighted content in Google Search results.

"Google is the largest scraper in the world," the company said in a blog post on Friday. "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."

Google in December 2025 sued SerpApi [PDF], alleging that its web scraping circumvents the security measures Google put in place to protect copyrighted material surfaced in search results. This was two months after Reddit filed a similar lawsuit against Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpApi ...