Last December, Google sued SerpApi over scraping its search results, and now a court has granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss the case. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.
You can see the court filing here (PDF) which basically says Google brought claims under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging SerpApi bypassed its anti-bot barrier ("SearchGuard"). However, Section 1201 only protects technological measures that restrict access to copyrighted works.
Plain and aggregated search results such as URLs, snippets, and factual index data, are publicly accessible facts and are not "works protected under the Copyright Act." The judge dismissed these claims without leave to amend, ruling that Google cannot use copyright law to block scraping of uncopyrighted search result data.
And for the knowledge panel, facts, etc, the judge said that Google does not own the copyright to most third-party web content it displays. To claim DMCA anti-circumvention protections over third-party material, Google needed to show that the actual copyright holders authorized Google to deploy access-control measures on their behalf. Google failed to allege this authorization in its original complaint, according to the judge. In this part, the judge dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.
The court affirmed that a platform doesn't necessarily have to be the sole copyright owner to sue under the DMCA if it suffers injury from circumvention - so Google has standing to bring claims if the underlying requirements are met. The judge agreed that spoofing browser fingerprints, rotating IPs, and solving CAPTCHAs to bypass SearchGuard constitutes "circumvention" under the DMCA. Circumvention alone is not illegal under the DMCA unless the barrier is actually guarding copyrighted works with the permission of the copyright holders.
And yes, this seems like a big win for scrapers - I doubt this is monetarilay material for Google:
A win for... scrapers? Whoa, big news in Google Land. And right ahead of their earnings call tomorrow. https://t.co/IXVYO9xzjE
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 21, 2026
SerpAPI posted about this over here and Bloomberg Law posted over here.
Forum discussion at X.
