Google cannot ban scraping of its search results

What happened?

On July 20, 2025, a federal judge in the Northern District of California dismissed Google's lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that scrapes Google's search results and sells them as structured data. Google had sued SerpApi in 2023 for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), breach of contract, and unfair competition, arguing that scraping its results infringed its terms of service and intellectual property rights. The lawsuit sought an injunction to stop SerpApi's operations and unspecified damages.

The court decision

The court, presided over by Judge Susan Illston, determined that Google's search results are public information and that their extraction does not constitute copyright infringement, as it does not reproduce protected works but factual data. Citing the case Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991), the judge noted that facts and data are not copyrightable, so Google cannot claim copyright over a mere list of results. Additionally, the court rejected Google's argument that SerpApi violated the DMCA by circumventing technological measures, as Google had not demonstrated that effective measures existed to protect the results. The judge also highlighted that Google cannot prevent the scraping of publicly available data, especially when the company itself built its business by scraping the web without permission. As The Next Web stated: "Google built one of the largest companies in the world by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it can't stop others from scraping Google."

Why is this important?

This ruling sets a significant legal precedent for the internet ecosystem. It reaffirms that public data on the web can be collected and reused, which is essential for innovation, competition, and transparency. Companies like SerpApi, which provide search data to startups, researchers, and developers, now have greater legal security. According to company data, SerpApi processes over 100 million queries per month and counts clients like HubSpot and Moz. The case also contrasts with Google's stance, which has been accused of anti-competitive practices while benefiting from scraping other sites. The decision could influence other similar litigation, such as those involving Meta, OpenAI, or Microsoft over the use of public data to train AI models. For example, in the case hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn (2019), an appeals court ruled that scraping LinkedIn's public data did not violate the law, setting a precedent that is now reinforced.

Market consequences

• For startups and developers: Greater freedom to create tools that rely on search data, such as alternative search engines, SEO analytics, or market intelligence. An example is the startup Neeva, which shut down in 2023 due to lack of traction, but which might have had easier access to search data now.
• For Google: Loss of control over its public data, which could affect its business model based on information exclusivity. Google generates over $200 billion in annual advertising revenue, partly thanks to selling search data to advertisers. If competitors can replicate this data, its competitive advantage diminishes.
• For the web in general: Reinforces the principle of openness that has allowed the internet to grow, though it also raises questions about privacy and ethical data use. For example, mass scraping can expose personal information if not properly anonymized.

What readers should know

The ruling is not final; Google can appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and it is likely to do so, given the company's aggressive stance against scraping. In fact, in 2024 Google filed a similar lawsuit against Bright Data, which is still ongoing. However, this ruling marks a clear direction: public data is not the exclusive property of those who generate it if it is accessible to everyone. For digital marketing professionals, the decision implies that scraping search results for competitive analysis is legal, as long as it does not violate other laws such as data protection (GDPR in Europe or CCPA in California). In the context of artificial intelligence, this case is relevant because many language models, such as GPT-4 and Claude, are trained on data scraped from the web. The decision suggests that as long as data is public, its collection for AI training could be legal, though the ethical and regulatory debate continues. For example, OpenAI has been sued by authors like George R.R. Martin for using their works without permission, but that case focuses on copyrighted works, not factual data.

Historical context

Google has always defended scraping as part of its operation: its search engine indexes the web using crawlers that copy content. However, when others do the same with its results, Google has considered it a threat. This case recalls earlier lawsuits like hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn, where a court ruled that scraping LinkedIn's public data did not violate the law. The judicial trend seems to favor openness of public data. There are also parallels with the case eBay vs. Bidder's Edge (2000), where eBay managed to stop scraping of its listings, but that ruling was based on trespass to chattels, an argument Google did not use here. In Europe, the Court of Justice of the EU has protected users' rights to extract data from public databases, as in the case Ryanair vs. PR Aviation (2015). Thus, the SerpApi ruling aligns with a global trend favoring the reuse of public data. For Google, this legal defeat adds to other regulatory pressures, such as the €4.3 billion fine from the European Commission for abusing its dominant position in Android (2018) and the antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice (2020). In summary, the SerpApi case is not only a victory for a small company but a milestone in the fight for internet openness and competition in the data market.