Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results against a company called SerpApi that turned Google's 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google's terms and conditions to scrape and resell search engine results pages (SERPs). This isn't the first action against SerpApi, but Google's decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance toward protecting its search data.
SerpApi and similar companies fill a need, but are in a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which are based on the world's largest and most comprehensive web index. That makes Google's SERPs especially valuable in the age of AI. A chatbot can't summarize web links if it can't find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for SerpApi's second-hand Google data. That prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity for pulling their data from Google results.
Google is repeating many of the things Reddit said when it published its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it does this not only to protect itself, but also to protect the websites it indexes. Google's blog post about the legal action states that SerpApi “violates websites' and rights holders' choices about who should have access to their content.”
It's worth noting that Google has a partnership with Reddit that sends data directly to Gemini. As a result, you'll often see Reddit pages cited in the chatbot's output. As Google notes, it adheres to “industry standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites did not agree to let SerpApi scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google's lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also explicitly protects Google's business interests.
