Google v. SerpApi: We’re filing a Motion to Dismiss. Here’s why we’re in the right.

Google thinks it owns the internet. That's the subtext of its lawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it's suddenly decided to shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And the law makes that clear.

In January, we promised that we would fight this lawsuit to protect our business model and the researchers and innovators who depend on our technology. Today, Friday, February 20, 2026, we’re following through with a motion to dismiss Google’s complaint. While this is just one step in what could be a long and costly legal process, I want to explain why we're confident in our position.

Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world. Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal.

Let’s nerd out about DMCA.

Google's complaint invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to stop SerpApi from accessing its website. But the DMCA is a copyright protection statute, not a website protection statute. There is a crucial difference. Google is a website operator. It is not the copyright holder of the information it surfaces. The underlying content in Google's search results is sourced from the tens of millions of publishers, authors, and creators across the internet. Google did not create that content. Google cannot use copyright to preclude access to public information on behalf of people who never asked it to and almost certainly don't know it's trying to.

Only a copyright holder can authorize "access controls" under the DMCA. Google is attempting to assert those rights on behalf of the entire internet, whether or not its search results contain copyrighted content, and without the knowledge or consent of the actual people whose work is at issue. That is not what the DMCA allows and it is not what Congress intended.

In its complaint, Google itself says its bot-detection and anti-scraping technologies exist to protect its advertising business. Not to protect any copyrighted work. Not to protect any creator or publisher. To protect its ability to generate revenue.

That is fatal to Google's DMCA claim. The statute protects "technological measures that effectively control access to a work." Google's tools do not control access to any specific copyrighted work. Google's search results don't distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted content. And every piece of underlying information Google surfaces remains fully available on the original public websites it scraped. When SerpApi retrieves search results, we are not circumventing anyone's copyright protection. We are accessing public information that has always been public.

Google's anti-bot tools serve one purpose: protecting Google's businesses and forming a monopoly. The DMCA was not designed to create walled gardens for tech giants.

The DMCA defines circumvention precisely: it means “to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure.” Read that carefully. Descramble. Decrypt. Impair.

SerpApi does none of those things. We access publicly visible web pages, the same ones accessible to any browser. We do not break encryption. We do not disable authentication systems. We do not access private data or non-public pages. We read what is already in plain sight.

If you do the math, even using the minimal numbers alleged, Google’s DMCA statutory damages would amount to a mere $7.06 trillion. Maximum penalties under Google’s creative interpretation of the DMCA would exceed U.S. GDP. That figure alone should tell you everything you need to know about whether Congress intended the DMCA to be used this way.

Google's complaint mentions the cost of building its infrastructure and the cost of maintaining its bot-detection tools. But it does not allege any real copyright harm caused by SerpApi.

That's because none has occurred. We provide structured access to publicly available information. The information remains publicly available. Google alleges that it created its bot-detection tools in part to impede SerpApi’s legal behavior. And Google alleges that its ability to command high ad prices depends on its continued power to artificially choke off access to public information.

But that’s not our problem. (And more importantly, that’s not a violation of the DMCA.)

We are not asking courts to break new ground. The law is already on our side.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed this directly in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., warning against the creation of “information monopolies that would disserve the public interest.” Google’s lawsuit is precisely the kind of information monopoly that court cautioned against. LinkedIn, like Google, wanted to use legal process to lock down publicly accessible data. The Ninth Circuit said no.

The Sixth Circuit’s reasoning in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International is equally instructive. The court explained that the DMCA cannot apply to otherwise readily accessible works, just as a lock on a back door does not control access to a house whose front door is wide open. Google’s search results are the front door. They are open. They are public. Putting a bot-detection system on the back end does not transform public information into a protected work.

SerpApi was started because we believe in the importance of a free and open internet, with public information easily accessible to all. These beliefs are deeply rooted in American culture and American jurisprudence, dating back to the passage of the First Amendment. And these beliefs have not changed. If anything, Google’s lawsuit has strengthened our conviction.

We have operated transparently and lawfully for years. Our business model is documented publicly. Our APIs are used by developers, researchers, journalists, and businesses who depend on access to information that Google would prefer to lock behind its own walls.

SerpApi is here to stay.

Why? Because Google has no right to restrict access to public information, no power to ban the same tools that it used (and continues to use) to build its businesses, and no standing to bring this lawsuit.

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

This was Google’s mission. But Google seems to have abandoned it, forgetting what the words “universally,” “accessible,” and “useful” mean. Forcing, SerpApi, a 42-person company, to take over and carry that mission forward.

You can read our motion here:

Questions? Contact press@serpapi.com.