Google pushes forward on AI scraping battle despite setback in court

Google has made clear it intends to pursue its legal campaign against web scrapers despite a significant courtroom defeat last week, bringing to light an increasingly contentious battle over who controls access to online content in the AI era.

The DMCA gambit#

The tech giant filed suit against SerpApi in December, invoking a copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—an unusual legal maneuver. Google alleged that the web scraper had bypassed its anti-scraping protections and then monetized the extracted search results through an unlicensed product marketed as a "Google Search API."

According to Google's argument, those protections existed to safeguard copyrighted material appearing in search results, particularly content licensed for placement in specialized display boxes known as knowledge panels. The company claimed that SerpApi's circumvention methods undermined its ability to maintain these valuable licensing relationships and to cover the operational costs of billions of automated queries.

However, the DMCA application proved controversial—search results themselves cannot be copyrighted, making this a legally creative but potentially overreaching use of the statute.

Reddit joins the fight#

Google was apparently inspired to attempt this legal theory after Reddit filed its own action in October against both SerpApi and competing AI search engine Perplexity, accusing them of scraping Reddit content visible in Google's search results. Reddit argued the scrapers were circumventing two layers of security—its own platform controls and Google's own anti-scraping systems.

When announcing its lawsuit, Google explicitly referenced Reddit's case, framing its own challenge as a "last resort" to combat what it labeled "malicious scraping" that violates content creators' wishes about who may access their material.

The bigger picture#

Legal experts see the DMCA approach as reflecting the scramble among major tech platforms to respond to the explosion of AI training and content harvesting over recent years. Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, notes that companies appear to be "sort of grasping at whatever tool is available" when facing this novel challenge. While the DMCA was never designed with AI scraping in mind, she explains, it has historically proven effective at rapidly halting unwanted content distribution and opening licensing negotiations—making it a logical, if unconventional, starting point for companies like Google seeking swift legal action.