Google files a lawsuit against SerpApi to cancel search results

Google has it I filed a lawsuit To protect its search results, it targeted a company called SerpApi that turned the ten Google blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores applicable law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell search engine results pages (SERPs). This isn’t the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after the data scraper may signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

SerpApi and similar companies fill a need, but they fall into a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which rely on the world’s largest and most comprehensive web index. This makes Google SERPs especially valuable in the age of artificial intelligence. A chatbot can’t summarize web links if it can’t find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for used Google data from SerpApi. This prompted Reddit to Filed a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity To get its data from Google results.

Google echoes many of the things Reddit said when it announced its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims that it’s not just doing this to protect itself, but it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post about the legal action, it says SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rights holders about who should have access to their content.”

It should be noted that Google has a partnership with Reddit that transfers data directly to Gemini. As a result, you’ll often see Reddit pages cited in chatbot output. As Google points out, it adheres to “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect data that appears on its SERP pages, but those sites have not agreed 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.