By Halimah DeLaine Prado
Publication Date: 2025-12-19 00:00:00
We filed a suit today against the scraping company SerpApi for circumventing security measures protecting others’ copyrighted content that appears in Google search results. We did this to ask a court to stop SerpApi’s bots and their malicious scraping, which violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content. This lawsuit follows legal action that other websites have taken against SerpApi and similar scraping companies, and is part of our long track record of affirmative litigation to fight scammers and bad actors on the web.
Google follows industry-standard crawling protocols, and honors websites’ directives over crawling of their content. Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing names — circumventing our security…
