Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) filed a lawsuit on Friday against Texas-based data scraping company SerpApi, accusing it of illegally harvesting copyrighted content through hundreds of millions of fraudulent search requests in what the tech giant called "staggering-scale free riding."
The complaint, lodged in California federal court, alleges SerpApi circumvented Alphabet's data protection measures to scrape and resell content to third parties. This marks the second major legal action against SerpApi this year, following Reddit's October lawsuit targeting the firm and other scrapers for allegedly feeding content to AI startup Perplexity's search engine development. Notably, Alphabet's filing makes no mention of Perplexity.
SerpApi's spokesperson has not responded to the allegations.
"These claims reflect our substantial investments in combating abuse and protecting website content in search results," said Halimah DeLaine Prado, Alphabet's Chief Legal Officer. "When our technical safeguards face such blatant circumvention, litigation becomes our necessary last resort."
Alphabet emphasized that its search results incorporate licensed content across services including Knowledge Panels, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. The lawsuit describes these "high-quality, content-rich" results as prime targets for SerpApi and its clients.
The company seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction against SerpApi's scraping activities. The case, officially titled Alphabet LLC v. SerpApi LLC, is filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under docket number 5:25-cv-10826.
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