Reddit is facing antitrust counterclaims from search-data provider SerpApi, which alleges the social-media company restricted competing search engines from crawling its public discussions while maintaining privileged access for Google under a partnership reportedly worth about $60 million a year.
The allegations are contained in a 63-page filing submitted Aug. 28 in federal court in Manhattan, according to PPC Land. SerpApi filed the claims while responding to an earlier lawsuit brought by Reddit accusing it and other companies of improperly circumventing technical measures designed to prevent automated collection of Reddit content.
SerpApi denies Reddit’s central allegations and is accusing the company of monopolization and attempted monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. It is seeking damages, including potential treble damages under federal antitrust law, as well as injunctive and declaratory relief, PPC Land reported.
At the center of the dispute is Reddit’s treatment of automated web crawlers.
According to PPC Land’s account of SerpApi’s filing, Reddit began serving different instructions to Google and other web crawlers on July 1, 2024. The counterclaims allege Google’s crawler remained able to index Reddit while rival search services, including Microsoft’s Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek and Qwant, were prevented from doing so.
The restriction followed Reddit’s announcement earlier that year of an expanded partnership with Google. The arrangement was reported to be worth roughly $60 million annually, according to PPC Land’s account of the filing.
SerpApi argues that the arrangement gave Google an advantage in accessing a large collection of human-generated conversations that have become increasingly valuable to search engines and artificial-intelligence companies.
The company is challenging Reddit’s characterization of its restrictions as copyright protections. PPC Land reported that SerpApi points to a roughly six-month period between the July 2024 crawler restrictions and Google’s deployment of a system called SearchGuard in January 2025. SerpApi contends that chronology undermines Reddit’s argument that the original restrictions were imposed primarily to protect copyrighted material.
The competing claims highlight a broader fight over the commercial value of publicly accessible internet content as technology companies seek large quantities of human-generated text for search products and AI systems.
Reddit users retain ownership rights to the material they post, while granting Reddit broad licensing rights, according to the company’s policies as described by PPC Land. SerpApi argues that Reddit has used those rights to license programmatic access to companies including Google and OpenAI while limiting access by other businesses.
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SerpApi also contends that its customers may already have authorization to access Reddit material through their own licensing arrangements and that its technology merely structures information they are entitled to retrieve. PPC Land reported that the company’s filing identifies customers including Salesforce, Adobe, Nvidia, Samsung, Shopify, KPMG, Experian, Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters, the United Nations and The New York Times.
The counterclaims attempt to define a market around large-scale collections of authentic human conversation used for search indexing and for training or grounding AI systems. SerpApi argues Reddit occupies a particularly important position in that market because of the scale and organization of its user discussions, according to PPC Land.
The litigation began after Reddit sued SerpApi and other defendants in October 2025, alleging they circumvented measures intended to stop unauthorized harvesting of Reddit posts through search results. Some claims against SerpApi have since been dismissed, while Reddit’s principal anti-circumvention allegations remain pending, PPC Land reported.
SerpApi General Counsel Chad Anson said the company believes Reddit shifted away from its historically open approach as it prepared to go public and began charging major technology companies for access to its data. Anson also argued that SerpApi sells tools for organizing public information rather than the underlying Reddit content itself, according to statements reported by PPC Land.
Reddit had not filed a response to the counterclaims at the time of PPC Land’s report. In its existing court filings, Reddit has maintained that defendants bypassed technological protections surrounding copyrighted material and caused harm that includes lost licensing revenue and costs associated with preventing scraping.
The allegations in SerpApi’s counterclaims have not been proven in court.
The dispute could help determine how far online platforms can go in restricting automated access to public material while separately licensing that material to selected technology companies. It could also test whether technical systems designed to distinguish human visitors from automated software qualify as copyright access controls under federal law.
Source: PPC Land
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