Google Sues SerpApi for ‘Parasitic’ Scraping and Circumvention of Protection Measures

On December 19, Google LLC filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against SerpApi, LLC, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The suit centers on claims that SerpApi, a “scraping” service, unlawfully circumvents Google’s technological barriers to scrape copyrighted content from its search results pages on a massive scale, thereby profiting from Google’s efforts without compensation.

Google’s complaint asserted that its search services are the product of “enormous investments of human and financial capital.” Through what the filing described as “decades of experimentation, enhancements, and expenditures,” Google has developed “first-in-class methods” for understanding what its users are looking for and locating relevant content from the vastness of the World Wide Web. The filing detailed how Google incorporates licensed copyrighted content into its search results for various services. For example, Knowledge Panels often provide copyrighted photographs, Google Maps relies on third-party images, and Google Shopping uses merchant-supplied pictures and information.

Google argued that “SerpApi’s business model is parasitic,” and that it “appropriates the output of other services that have made substantial investments to generate it.” SerpApi offers its customers a “Google Search API” that it advertises as a way to “Scrape Google,” according to the complaint. The filing stated that SerpApi uses automated means to scrape this content at an “astonishing scale” and then sells it to its customers. Google’s complaint noted that SerpApi’s automated requests have increased by “as much as 25,000%” over the last two years, now numbering in the hundreds of millions each day.

In an effort to halt this conduct, Google developed and deployed a technological measure known as SearchGuard, which the complaint described as the product of “tens of thousands of person hours and millions of dollars of investment.” Launched in January 2025, SearchGuard’s purpose is to prevent unauthorized third parties from automatically accessing Google’s search results and appropriating the copyrighted content they contain. The technology works by sending a JavaScript “challenge” to search queries to validate that the query originates from a real user rather than automated software.

Google alleged that as soon as SearchGuard was implemented, SerpApi immediately began working on a means to circumvent it. The complaint described how SerpApi masks its automated queries to make them appear to come from human users, quoting SerpApi’s founder, Julien Khaleghy, who described the process as “creating fake browsers using a multitude of IP addresses that Google sees as normal users.”

The complaint further detailed that SerpApi’s “fakery takes many forms.” These methods of evasion include misrepresenting the device, software, or location from which a query is sent in order to solve the challenge and obtain authorization to submit queries. The filing also stated that SerpApi may solve a SearchGuard challenge with a “legitimate” request and then syndicate the resulting authorization, sharing it with unauthorized machines around the world to enable their “fake browsers” to generate automated queries that appear to Google as authorized. SerpApi also allegedly uses automated means to bypass CAPTCHAs, another aspect of SearchGuard that tests users to ensure they are humans rather than machines.

The filing also pointed to a recent blog post in which SerpApi boasted of circumventing SearchGuard. The post explained that SearchGuard had made “web scraping more difficult,” but claimed it was “fortunate to be minimally impacted” because its services had “already pre-solved Google’s JavaScript challenge.” SerpApi also promised that if Google implements new technological protection measures, SerpApi intends to bypass those as well, stating, “it’s hard to say what Google might do going forward[.] However, at SerpApi we’re confident in our ability to handle any new variations to these changes Google might introduce.”

Google’s first cause of action is for violation of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A), which prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The complaint asserted that, on billions of separate occasions, SerpApi has circumvented SearchGuard to access Google Search results and the copyrighted content they contain. For these violations, Google may elect to recover statutory damages of at least $200 and up to $2,500 for each of SerpApi’s many statutory violations.

Google’s second cause of action is for violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2), which prohibits trafficking in technology designed for circumvention. The complaint argued that SerpApi manufactures, offers to the public, and otherwise traffics in services and technology that are marketed with the knowledge that they will be used to circumvent SearchGuard. The filing noted that SerpApi’s services and technology have, at most, a limited commercially significant purpose beyond the circumvention of SearchGuard.

The complaint stated that SerpApi’s statutory violations have caused and will continue to cause harm to Google. This harm includes the direct imposition of costs to respond to SerpApi’s billions of automated queries, the undermining of Google’s investment in the copyrighted content it has licensed, the threatening of Google’s relationship with content licensors, and the forcing of Google to incur substantial costs to develop and enhance technological measures.

Notably, Google ultimately prevailed in defending itself in a decade-long case against copyright infringement for its Google Books project, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said constituted fair use.

Google is asking the court for an order enjoining SerpApi from circumventing Google’s technological protection measures and from trafficking in any technology designed for that purpose. The filing also requests the destruction of any technology or products involved in the alleged violations. In addition, Google seeks to recover either statutory damages for each violation or its actual damages and SerpApi’s profits, along with costs and attorneys’ fees.