Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called Serapy that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This isn’t the first action against Serpentine, but Google’s decision to take action against the scraper may signal a new, more aggressive stance towards protecting its search data.
Serapi and similar companies fill a need, but they 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. This 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 leads companies like Perplexity to pay for Serpent’s second-hand Google data. This prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against Serpentine and Perplexity for grabbing its data from Google results.
Google is reiterating many of the things Reddit said when it publicized its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it’s not just doing this to keep itself safe – it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post on the legal action, it said that Serapy “infringes on websites and rightsholders’ 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 quoted in the chatbot’s output. As Google states, it follows “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites did not agree to let Serapse scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google’s lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also clearly protects Google’s business interests.
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