Google says it will keep fighting SerpApi after a court setback in its attempt to block AI-related scraping of Google search results. The company sued SerpApi under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that the scraper circumvented anti-scraping technology and sold access through an unauthorized Google Search API.
The legal theory is unusual because Google search results themselves are not copyrightable in the ordinary sense. Ars Technica reports that Google framed the anti-scraping controls as protecting copyrighted content that can appear inside results, including material in knowledge panels. Reddit has made a similar argument in a case involving SerpApi and Perplexity.
The dispute matters because AI scraping has pushed platforms to test old legal tools against new data-access fights. A policy expert quoted by Ars called the DMCA theory “bizarre,” but not surprising, because the law has often been used to force takedowns and licensing negotiations. The outcome could shape how aggressively platforms try to wall off search and social content from AI tools.