Google has initiated legal proceedings to safeguard its search results, targeting a company named SerpApi. This firm has created a business model around transforming Google's iconic '10 blue links.' According to Google, SerpApi disregards established legal frameworks and Google's terms by scraping and reselling Google's search engine result pages (SERPs).
This lawsuit is not Google's first encounter with SerpApi, but it may indicate a shift towards a more assertive strategy in protecting its search data.
Companies such as SerpApi fulfill a market demand, but they operate in a complex legal environment. Google does not offer an API for its search results, which originate from the largest and most extensive web index globally. This makes Google's SERPs highly valuable, especially in the AI era. For instance, AI chatbots require access to comprehensive web links to effectively provide summaries, leading companies like Perplexity to purchase SerpApi's alternative Google data. Such activities have led Reddit to file lawsuits against both SerpApi and Perplexity for extracting its data from Google's results.
The allegations in Google's lawsuit echo those made by Reddit when it launched its legal actions earlier this year. Google asserts that its lawsuit intends not only to protect its interests but also the interests of the websites it indexes. In a blog post detailing the legal action, Google stated that SerpApi 'violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.'
It's important to note that Google maintains a partnership with Reddit, directly integrating data into its Gemini platform, which is why Reddit pages frequently appear in Google's chatbot results. Google practices 'industry-standard crawling protocols' to gather information displayed on its SERPs, and those websites did not consent to SerpApi scraping data from Google. Thus, while the lawsuit could be seen as a measure to defend the rights of web publishers, it also serves to protect Google's own business interests.