Google’s December 2025 lawsuit against SerpApi demands $2.8 million in damages and a permanent injunction that would shut down SerpApi’s core business model.

The 13-page complaint alleges terms of service violations and argues that automated access to public search results constitutes federal copyright infringement.

This case will determine whether competitive analysis remains possible or becomes legally prohibited.

Depending on the results, this case could reshape how the entire SEO industry operates. If successful, it establishes precedent that third-party search data access — the basis for most SEO research as we know it — violates federal copyright law.

Google alleges that SerpApi operates a “parasitic business model” that generates millions of fake search queries to extract and redistribute Google’s search results. The complaint details how SerpApi uses residential proxy networks, browser automation, CAPTCHA-solving services, and other means to circumvent Google’s bot detection systems. Google claims search results pages (SERPs) are copyrightable works, and SerpApi’s extraction methods violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions.

SerpApi responded with a motion to dismiss in February 2026, arguing that Google misuses copyright law to stifle legitimate competition in the SEO tools market. Their core argument is that search results are factual information that cannot be copyrighted, and providing API access to publicly available search data serves legitimate business purposes.

SerpApi’s legal team contends that Google’s lawsuit represents “an unprecedented expansion of copyright law” that would give search engines monopolistic control over access to information that users can freely view in browsers.

For the last few years, Google has been degrading third-party access to search data. The removal of the num=100 parameter meant SEO tools could no longer retrieve full SERP data in single requests. API rate limits tightened, and custom Search JSON API access became more restrictive.

Google now uses federal copyright law as a weapon against companies that provide search data access. Google’s official blog post on the subject frames this as protecting “the integrity of our services and the trust of our users,” but the practical effect establishes legal precedent that could eliminate third-party search data providers entirely. If Google gets its way, it will create a legal environment that makes any automated search result access legally risky.

This lawsuit also aims to protect Google’s search results as proprietary training data for its own AI models, while preventing competitors from accessing the same information. SerpApi’s response brief explicitly argues that Google’s real motivation is maintaining monopolistic control over search data.

Pretty spicy.

Google apparently hates search data access

Google has taken a number of measures, especially in the last few years, to keep people on Google Dot Com for longer than we used to stay. SEO professionals have felt the effects for sure: The first page used to be a reliably 10 results, and now many queries show only 6-8 non-YouTube links (no source linked here — feel free to perform a search and see for yourself). AI Overviews, People Also Ask, Featured Snippets, you name it. But that’s only what’s happened on the front end.

Google has also enacted a strategy of methodical destruction of legitimate data access channels. A while ago, Google Developers documentation announced that the Custom Search Site Restricted JSON API would cease serving traffic on January 8, 2025, forcing customers to transition to Google Cloud’s paid enterprise solutions.

Google pulled the plug on free API access that thousands of developers had built their businesses around, offering only expensive enterprise alternatives that priced out smaller SEO agencies and independent tool builders.

The aforementioned num=100 parameter removal hit even harder. For years, SEO tools relied on retrieving 100 search results per query to build comprehensive ranking reports and competitive analysis dashboards. When Google capped results at 10 per request, it broke fundamental tools that entire product categories depended on. Massive industry players like Ahrefs and Semrush are now, in my opinion, showing data that’s only slightly better than a guess.

Google Search Console API became the company’s preferred deflection whenever developers complained about restricted access. But Console data only shows backward-looking metrics for websites you own and verify. Competitive analysis, rank tracking across industries, and SERP feature monitoring became impossible through official channels.

This created the exact market conditions that made SerpApi valuable. Google eliminated official pathways, then acted surprised when companies built unofficial ones. Google’s current lawsuit argues that providing the data access Google itself abandoned constitutes theft and circumvention.

Google’s strategy seems to be:

  1. Make official access expensive or unavailable.
  2. Wait for third-party solutions to emerge and gain market dependence.
  3. Use legal action to eliminate those solutions, while offering no alternative.

I assume their goal with all this is to allow workarounds to pop up so they can identify what those workarounds are, and then block those types of access to consolidate control. To what end?

Probably to make people see more ads.

It’s always ads with these guys.

Don’t build the search infrastructure Google abandoned, I guess

When Google shuttered official data access, SerpApi built the search infrastructure that Google actively refused to provide.

SerpApi processes substantial API volume across multiple search engines, delivering structured JSON responses that would take enterprise development teams months to build from scratch. Their infrastructure handles IP rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and rate limiting automatically, technical challenges that consume weeks of development time for companies attempting internal scrapers. The service transforms raw HTML into clean, queryable data structures. It works reliably at scale, something Google’s deprecated APIs never delivered for competitive intelligence use cases.

Major SEO platforms depend on third-party scraping precisely because Google’s remaining official APIs exclude competitive intelligence features by design. Ahrefs acknowledged in September 2025 that Google’s removal of 100-result pages forced them to adapt their rank tracking methodology entirely. Semrush and Moz face similar constraints when Google’s Console API only shows data for verified properties you own.

Where Google charges enterprise customers thousands monthly for limited Cloud Search capabilities, SerpApi offers comprehensive search data access for $50-500 monthly depending on volume.

Google created this market by abandoning it, then sued the company that served it.

If Google’s lawsuit succeeds, it has a very real chance to destroy the foundational data that powers the entire SEO industry. The U.S. SEO market reached $103.7 billion in 2024, with competitive analysis services representing a large part of that revenue. Many SEO agencies generate millions annually from rank tracking, competitor monitoring, and keyword gap analysis that require comprehensive SERP data across hundreds of result pages. Google’s official APIs deliberately exclude this competitive intelligence data, making third-party scraping the only viable source for professional SEO services.

We as SEO professionals need keyword research tools that track ranking fluctuations across 50-100 results to identify content opportunities, local SEO that monitors map pack results across different geographic locations, and often expensive platforms like Semrush that built their entire value proposition around competitive visibility data that Google’s Console API explicitly withholds for unverified domains.

Maybe I’m biased, given that my livelihood depends on SEO remaining a viable career path, but surely this is a shortsighted and dangerous game Google is playing.

Google’s “fake searches” claims

Google’s complaint alleges that SerpApi uses residential proxies and browser automation to simulate human searches, techniques that bypass rate limiting but access the same publicly available search results pages that Google serves to any browser. The company frames automated queries as “fake searches” because they generate real search results without human users seeking information. But this characterization applies equally to Google’s own web crawlers, news aggregators, and every search engine indexing the internet.

SerpApi’s motion to dismiss argues their methods access publicly available content that Google voluntarily serves to browsers without authentication or paywalls.

In attempts to prevent automated scraping like this, Google deploys CAPTCHAs that cost $0.001 per solve, IP blocks that force $200/month proxy services, and request signatures that break every 48 hours designed to prevent automated access even to public search results.

But these measures don’t somehow transform public webpage access into copyright violation. Residential proxies and browser automation simply distribute requests across multiple IP addresses to avoid rate limiting, the same technique used by content delivery networks and enterprise web applications.

Accessing publicly available web content through automated means should constitute fair use when no terms of service are violated and no authentication is bypassed. Google argues that efficient access to public information should be illegal when it competes with their own business interests.

At the same time:

  • Google’s web crawlers access billions of pages daily without explicit permission from website owners, often ignoring robots.txt files when commercially convenient.
  • Google Images scrapes and serves copyrighted photographs from across the internet.
  • Google Scholar automatically extracts and indexes academic papers.
  • Google Shopping crawls e-commerce sites to build product comparison databases.

But when someone like SerpApi applies identical techniques to Google’s own search results pages, suddenly automated access becomes “circumvention of technical protection measures” worthy of federal litigation.

And yeah, I’m rooting for the little guy.

Three potential outcomes for the SEO industry

Google’s complete legal victory would force the SEO industry into a first-party data prison:

  • Rank tracking would become impossible beyond the handful of queries Google permits through Console API. The $100+ billion SEO services market would contract to basic technical audits and on-page optimization, eliminating the competitive analysis that drives most agency revenue.
  • Courts ruling in favor of scraping as fair use would trigger Google’s retaliation. Google would deploy sophisticated bot detection, mandatory JavaScript challenges, and IP-based blocking that makes scraping exponentially more expensive (even while remaining technically possible).
  • Regulatory intervention represents the only path toward sustainable data access for SEO professionals. The European Commission designated Google as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, creating precedent for mandating API access to competitors and business users who depend on search data.

The most probable outcome combines all three elements, probably over the next two years or so.

Google will eliminate some third-party services while raising costs for others through technical countermeasures. European regulators will pressure Google toward limited API expansion, but comprehensive data access will remain restricted. Agencies paying $200/month for SerpApi would face $1,000+ monthly costs for equivalent Google Cloud services while building hybrid strategies that blend official APIs, expensive scraping services, and historical analysis. The industry will survive, but smaller agencies and independent consultants will find competitive analysis financially impossible, creating a two-tier market where data access determines who can compete for enterprise SEO contracts.

This Google lawsuit against SerpApi doesn’t protect copyrighted content.

It aims to make it so, when SEO professionals need search data, we have exactly one place from which to buy it.

References

  1. Ahrefs. (2025, September 19). An update on recent Google changes to SERP monitoring. SEO Blog by Ahrefs. https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-serp-changes-update/ 
  2. Brittain, B. (2025, December 19). Google lawsuit says data scraping company uses fake searches to steal web content. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-lawsuit-says-data-scraping-company-uses-fake-searches-steal-web-content-2025-12-19/ 
  3. Custom Search Site Restricted JSON API. (2025). Google for Developers. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/site_restricted_api 
  4. DMA designated Gatekeepers. (2023). Digital Markets Act (DMA). https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_en 
  5. Esfandiari, R. (2025, December 26). Google Sues SerpApi for “Parasitic” Scraping and Circumvention of Protection Measures. IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Intellectual Property Law. https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/12/26/google-sues-serpapi-parasitic-scraping-circumvention-protection-measures/ 
  6. Goodwin, D. (2026, February 23). SerpApi moves to dismiss Google scraping lawsuit. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/serpapi-motion-dismiss-google-scraping-lawsuit-469889 
  7. Google LLC v. SerpApi, LLC. (2025, December 19). Northern District of California | United States District Court. https://cand.uscourts.gov/cases-e-filing/cases/425-cv-10826-ygr/google-llc-v-serpapi-llc 
  8. Julien Khaleghy. (2026, February 20). Google v. SerpApi: We’re filing a Motion to Dismiss. Here’s why we’re in the right. SerpApi. https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-why-were-in-the-right/ 
  9. Prado, H. D. (2025, December 19). Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping. Google. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/serpapi-lawsuit/ 
  10. U.S. SEO & Internet Marketing Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis, 2032. (2026). P&S Intelligence. https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/us-seo-internet-marketing-market