A PYMNTS Company

Google Sues Texas Firm Over Alleged Massive Scraping of Search Data

By  |  December 22, 2025

Google has filed a lawsuit against a Texas-based company it accuses of extracting vast amounts of data from its search results, claiming the practice undermines protections around copyrighted material, according to Reuters.

    Get the Full Story

    Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

    yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today.

    By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

    The complaint, lodged on Friday in federal court in California, targets SerpApi, a company that offers tools to collect and structure search engine results. Google alleges that SerpApi generated hundreds of millions of artificial search queries to gain access to content embedded in Google’s results and then resold that information to third parties, per Reuters.

    Google contends that SerpApi deliberately bypassed technical safeguards designed to prevent automated scraping and protect content licensed from other publishers. The lawsuit argues that Google’s search pages, which incorporate licensed material across products such as Knowledge Panels, Google Maps, and Google Shopping, are particularly attractive to scrapers because of their depth and quality, according to Reuters.

    SerpApi rejected the allegations and said it plans to contest the case. “The information we provide is the same information any person can see in their browser without signing in,” the company said in a statement. “We believe this lawsuit is an effort to stifle competition from the innovators who rely on our services to build next-generation AI, security, browsers, productivity, and many other applications.”

    Read more: Mexico Antitrust Authority Closes Android Competition Case After Google Commitments

    Google, however, framed the lawsuit as a necessary response to what it described as large-scale abuse. “We devote significant resources to fighting this abuse and protecting websites’ content in our results,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said in a statement. “When our technical security protections are circumvented in such a brazen way, as a last resort we take legal action to stop this behavior.”

    The case echoes a separate legal action brought by Reddit in October, in which the social media platform accused SerpApi and other data-scraping firms of improperly taking its content to support artificial intelligence development. A Reddit spokesperson said the company was “encouraged” by Google’s decision to sue SerpApi, adding, “When bad actors scrape content without permission or guardrails, they are turning the openness of the Internet against itself,” according to Reuters. Google’s lawsuit does not mention Perplexity, the AI search startup referenced in Reddit’s earlier complaint.

    In its filing, Google is seeking monetary damages, the amount of which was not specified, as well as a court order that would bar SerpApi from continuing to scrape its search results, per Reuters.

    The case is Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 5:25-cv-10826.

    Source: Reuters