Google Sues SerpApi: What the Scraping Lawsuit Means for SEO Tools

Do you rely on a rank tracker, a SERP feature monitor or any SEO platform that reports what Google shows for a keyword? Then the Google SerpApi lawsuit is worth five minutes of your time. On 19 December 2025, Google sued SerpApi, a Texas company that sells Google search results through an API (a feed other software can plug into). Google says SerpApi gets around its anti-bot protection, called SearchGuard, and resells content from Search, some of which Google licenses from others.

Nothing changes in your tools overnight. The case is at its very first stage. No court has ruled on anything, and SerpApi disputes the claims. But it shows clearly how Google views large-scale scraping of its results. That matters for anyone who pays for SERP data, and in my view that is most of us in SEO.

In this article I cover what Google has filed, what it is asking for, what SerpApi has said, and what the case could mean for rank tracking, SEO data costs and your own reporting. I am reporting the allegations. This is not legal advice, and I am not trying to predict the outcome.

What Happened in the Google SerpApi Lawsuit

Google filed the complaint on Friday, 19 December 2025, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The same day, Google’s General Counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, published a post on Google’s official blog called “Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping“.

The blog post makes four main points:

• Google says it follows industry-standard crawling rules and respects what websites tell it about crawling their content.
• It accuses “stealthy” scrapers like SerpApi of overriding those choices. It says they hide who they are, use large networks of bots and keep changing fake crawler names.
• It says SerpApi takes content that Google licenses from others, such as images in Knowledge Panels and real-time data in Search features, and resells it for a fee.
• It says this activity “increased dramatically over the past year”. It describes legal action as a step it takes when someone gets around its technical protections.

Google also points out that the lawsuit follows legal action other websites have already taken against SerpApi and similar firms. That refers to Reddit, which sued SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity on 22 October 2025. Reddit alleged they scraped Reddit content from Google’s results.

The Legal Claims in Plain English

The complaint is built on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), in particular its anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201. Those rules make it unlawful to get around a “technological measure” that controls access to copyrighted work. They also make it unlawful to sell tools or services made to do that.

Google’s argument goes like this:

1. Search results pages contain copyrighted material. That includes photos in Knowledge Panels, merchant images in Shopping, and images and reviews in Maps.
2. SearchGuard is a technological measure that controls access to that material.
3. SerpApi gets around SearchGuard to reach the material, which Google says breaks Section 1201(a)(1)(A).
4. SerpApi then sells that workaround as a service, which Google says breaks the anti-trafficking rule in Section 1201(a)(2).

I find this framing notable. Many scraping disputes are argued on terms of service or computer access laws. Here, Google’s main claims rest on the idea that getting past an anti-bot check is itself a form of unlawful circumvention. Whether a court accepts that is exactly what the case will test.

What Google Is Asking the Court For

According to reports on the complaint, Google is asking for:

• An injunction (a court order) stopping SerpApi from getting around Google’s protections or selling circumvention technology.
• Destruction of the technology used in the alleged violations.
• Statutory damages of $200 to $2,500 per violation, or actual damages plus SerpApi’s profits.
• Costs and lawyers’ fees.

Google alleges circumvention on a very large scale. It estimates SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of automated search requests a day. It says that volume grew by as much as 25,000% over two years. Those are Google’s figures and allegations, not facts a court has found.

What Is SearchGuard?

SearchGuard is the name Google uses in the complaint for the anti-bot system it launched in January 2025. In simple terms, it sends a JavaScript challenge with search requests. The challenge checks whether a real person in a real browser is behind the request, not an automated script.

You may remember the visible side of this. In January 2025, Google Search started requiring JavaScript for users. Several SEO tools reported problems with their data collection around the same time. In the complaint, Google describes SearchGuard as the result of tens of thousands of person-hours and millions of dollars of investment.

The complaint alleges that SerpApi solves these challenges with automated “fake browsers”, disguises its traffic and keeps changing identities so its requests look like normal users. Google says that is the circumvention at the heart of the case.

What SerpApi Has Said

SerpApi has denied wrongdoing. Its General Counsel, Chad Anson, shared a statement with the search marketing press after the filing. The company said:

• It had not yet been served with the complaint, and Google had not contacted it before filing.
• The information it provides is “the same information any person can see in their browser without signing in”.
• It sees the suit as an attempt to block competition from companies that rely on its services.
• It “stands firmly behind its business model and will vigorously defend itself in court”.

SerpApi’s website states that crawling and parsing public data is protected by the First Amendment. I expect that public-data argument to be part of its defence. So will the question of whether solving a JavaScript challenge counts as circumvention under the DMCA. The court will weigh those arguments. Nothing has been decided.

Why Google Is Restricting Scraping of Its Results

Google has never offered a public API that returns its organic search results. Its terms have long banned automated queries. What has changed in 2025 is how actively Google enforces that rule.

From Google’s side, there are three clear reasons. It states two of them directly:

• Licensed content. Google pays for or licenses some of what appears in Search features. When a scraper resells that content, Google says it harms the rights of the people who supplied it.
• Website choices. Google frames the case as protecting publishers. Its point is that a site can control Googlebot with robots.txt and other instructions. But a disguised scraper ignores those choices and takes the content from Google’s pages instead.
• Cost and load. Hundreds of millions of automated queries a day use up servers and are not real users who might see ads. Google raises this in the complaint, not in the blog post, so treat it as Google’s argument.

There is also context the blog post does not spell out, but most of the industry has noticed. Search results have become valuable raw material for AI products. They are fresh, structured and show what Google sees as relevant. SerpApi is known to supply search data to AI companies, and Reddit’s October suit named Perplexity alongside it.

The num=100 Change as Context

The lawsuit is not Google’s first move this year that affected SEO data. In September 2025, Google stopped supporting the &num=100 URL parameter. That parameter let tools load 100 results on one page. Google said it was not something it formally supported.

That change forced rank trackers to make up to ten requests to see the same 100 positions. It also explained a sudden drop in desktop impressions in Search Console. We covered the details in our explainer on Google dropping the num=100 parameter.

Google has not linked num=100 to the SerpApi case, and you should not assume one caused the other. But taken together, SearchGuard, num=100 and now a lawsuit point the same way. Collecting Google results at scale is getting harder and more expensive.

What the Lawsuit Could Mean for Rank Trackers and SEO Tools

Here is the honest picture. Most rank trackers and SEO platforms do not publish exactly how they collect Google data. Some run their own crawlers, some buy from SERP API providers like SerpApi, and many use a mix. So the impact will be different for each tool.

Short Term: No Change You Need to React To

A complaint is an allegation. Nothing in it stops SerpApi from operating today, and no injunction has been issued. If your tool uses SerpApi, your data should keep flowing while the case goes on. My advice: do not cancel subscriptions or rebuild reporting in a panic.

Medium Term: Higher Data Costs Are the Real Risk

Even without a ruling, the cost of collecting Google results has been rising through 2025. After SearchGuard, providers had to spend more on browsers that run JavaScript, on proxies and on solving challenges. Then num=100 meant more requests per keyword.

Legal risk adds another cost. Providers may spend more on compliance and legal defence. Some may decide parts of the market are not worth the risk. Any of these costs can reach customers as:

• Higher prices per tracked keyword.
• Less frequent updates, for example weekly instead of daily tracking on cheaper plans.
• Shallower tracking, such as only the top 20 or 30 positions by default.
• Fewer SERP features captured, or fewer locations and devices included.

None of this is certain. It is simply where the pressure will land if collecting Google data keeps getting more expensive.

Which Data Is Most Exposed

Not all SEO data depends on scraping Google in the same way. I find it helps to separate it out:

The pattern is simple. The more a metric depends on seeing Google results for sites you do not own, the more it relies on third-party collection. And the more it is hit when Google tightens access.

AI Visibility Tracking

Many newer tools that report on AI Overviews and AI Mode also need to load Google results to see what appears. They face the same collection problems as rank trackers. If you have started paying for AI visibility reports, it is fair to ask the vendor how they collect that data and how stable they expect it to be.

How to Reduce Your Dependence on Scraped SERP Data

You cannot control how this case goes. But you can make your reporting stronger. Here is a practical process I’d use for any site or client.

1. List every metric you report and where it comes from. Go through your monthly report and tag each number as first-party (Search Console, analytics, CRM) or third-party (rank trackers, keyword tools, competitor tools).
2. Make Search Console your baseline. Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for your own pages come straight from Google. If you are not comfortable with the reports yet, start with our Search Console guide for beginners.
3. Cut down your tracked keyword list. Track the keywords tied to revenue or leads every day. Move the long tail to weekly checks or Search Console query data. Fewer requests means lower costs if prices rise.
4. Ask your tool vendors direct questions. How do they collect Google data? Do they rely on a single outside provider? What happens to your data if that provider has problems? A good vendor will give you a straight answer.
5. Treat competitor data as a rough guide. Use third-party competitor rankings and traffic estimates to spot trends and chances, not as exact figures. Our step-by-step competitor analysis method works with rough data.
6. Agree on KPIs that survive tool changes. Build client and management reports around results such as organic conversions and clicks, with rankings as background.

Take a made-up example. An online shop tracks 2,000 keywords daily. After an audit, it keeps 300 commercial terms on daily tracking, moves the rest to weekly, and reports category performance from Search Console. If SERP data prices rise, the business barely notices. If nothing changes, it has still cut costs and noise. Honestly, this is a clean-up I’d recommend even without the lawsuit.

Is Scraping Google Search Results Illegal?

This is the question most people ask. The honest answer is that this case has not settled anything yet. Google’s terms of service have long banned automated queries. But breaking terms of service and breaking federal law are different things.

Google is arguing that getting around SearchGuard breaks the DMCA. SerpApi argues it provides public information anyone can see. A court will decide which view fits these facts, and that could take a long time. If your business collects Google results directly, or builds products on a SERP API, speak to a lawyer about your own situation. Do not rely on news coverage, including mine.

What This Does Not Change

It is easy to overreact to legal headlines, so here are a few points to keep in mind:

• Google’s crawling and ranking of your site are not affected. The case is about who can collect Google’s results, not how Google judges pages.
• Search Console and its API are first-party tools and are not part of this dispute.
• The basics of SEO do not change. Useful content, a crawlable site and a clear structure still decide most results.
• Rank tracking was never a perfect measure. Results vary by location, device and personalisation, so tracked positions have always been an estimate. I have always treated them that way.

Conclusion

The Google SerpApi lawsuit, filed on 19 December 2025, is Google’s most direct challenge yet to companies that scrape and resell its search results. Google says SerpApi gets around SearchGuard and resells licensed content in breach of the DMCA. SerpApi denies it and says it will defend itself. For now, it is an allegation in a California federal court, and your tools will keep working.

My practical takeaway is to make your reporting less dependent on any single source of scraped data. Build your baseline on first-party numbers, keep rank tracking focused, and ask vendors where their data comes from. A good next step is to review what you report against the SEO KPIs worth measuring in 2026 and move the outcome metrics to the top of your dashboard.