Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi:
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.
I’ve come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google’s search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I’ve come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It’s all just scraping publicly accessible web pages.
This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind:
Look, SerpApi’s behavior is sketchy. Spoofing user agents,
rotating IPs to look like legitimate users, solving CAPTCHAs
programmatically — Google’s complaint paints a picture of a
company actively working to evade detection. But the legal theory
Google is deploying to stop them threatens something far bigger
than one shady scraper.Google’s entire business is built on scraping as much of the web
as possible without first asking permission. The fact that they
now want to invoke DMCA 1201 — one of the most consistently
abused provisions in copyright law — to stop others from scraping
them exposes the underlying problem with these licensing-era
arguments: they’re attempts to pull up the ladder after you’ve
climbed it.Just from a straight up perception standpoint, it looks bad.
