Let's get back to December 2025. Google sued SerpAPI for, as they name it, "unlawful scraping". They are saying that SerpAPI and similar companies deceptively take content from Google and sell that for a fee. In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in search.

That sounded like a lot of long nights without sleep for SerpAPI owner Julien Khaleghy, as according to getlatka.com estimates Google's total annual revenue for 2025 was 134,000 times higher than SerpAPI's ($402.84 billion compared to $3 million). Who expects to win a legal case against Google when your annual revenue is less than your opponent's legal team salaries for 1 month? But fast forward to July 21, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted SerpAPI's motion to dismiss Google's lawsuit.

Not so easy

That was great news for everyone working with web data, but like many fellow colleagues in this niche, I felt that it's not the end and Google won't leave this case that easily. And yet, August 10, 2026, Google refiled its lawsuit, and honestly the new angle is kind of genius. Annoying, but genius. The new complaint includes terms from Google's content licensing agreements, the exact material the Chief U.S. District Judge said was missing from the original filing. Google was given 21 days to amend the complaint and filed on the final day.

Hero Google and Poor Reddit

Now they're the hero protecting their poor licensing partners. Reddit, mainly. Google says Reddit told them don't let other people take our content and sell it, so Google is just honoring that. For Reddit. Out of the kindness of their heart.

But it's a smart move, I'll give them that. "Stop scraping us" is weak. "We have to protect our partners' licensed data" actually holds up in court.

What that means for the scraping community

It stopped being about SerpAPI a while ago. And that’s the part worth watching. If Google wins this, the fight quietly shifts from “can you scrape public search results” to “who controls licensed content once it appears inside a platform”. Those are two very different questions, and the second one has much bigger consequences.

Public data has always been the safe ground for anyone in this space. The basic logic was simple: if anyone can see it, anyone can collect it. But if Google succeeds with this new angle, that ground gets much smaller.

Suddenly, it’s not just about whether the data is public. It’s about who licensed it upstream, what restrictions came with that license, and whether those restrictions can follow the data downstream.

And that’s where things get messy. The person scraping the data may have no idea those agreements even exist. You could be collecting something that is completely visible to the public and still find yourself caught downstream of a licensing deal you never saw and were never part of.

And that doesn't smell good for me. Because the companies who can afford to sign those licensing deals are the big ones. The platforms sit in the middle, cut deals with each other, and everyone smaller gets locked out. Not because the data isn't public, but because they weren't invited to the table. Then we're 1 step closer to a handful of big companies running the whole web and its data, deciding who gets access and who doesn't.

Who is suing who?

Looking at this whole situation ironically, Reddit should now sue Google for not protecting its data. Will we see that coming, or does protecting licensed content only kick in when the person reading it isn't cutting them a check, huh? :)