Is scraping Google's search results a DMCA violation? A judge said not by itself — so Google's amended complaint pivots to licensed content

What happened, from the docket

Google sued SerpApi — the API vendor that sells structured, scraped Google results at scale — in the Northern District of California on 2025-12-19, pleading two claims under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and § 1201(a)(2)): that SerpApi circumvents SearchGuard, Google's anti-bot access control, and traffics in the means to do so. On 2026-07-20, the court granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss — partly with leave to amend, and partly without: where the scraped results pages contain no copyrighted content, the DMCA claims "fail as a matter of law" and "amendment would be futile." Google's amended complaint, filed on the court's 2026-08-10 deadline, re-pleads both § 1201 claims — now built on the copyrighted material Google licenses into its results.

The licensed-content theory, in Google's own words

The amended complaint's clearest new material is contractual. Google describes its licensing agreement with Reddit as one that "directs Google not to enable third parties to extract and independently commercialize the licensed content," and alleges its licensing partners have "expressly requested that Google prevent unauthorized access to licensed content." It also leans on Reddit's separate, ongoing suit against SerpApi (Reddit Inc. v. SerpApi LLC, No. 25-cv-8736, S.D.N.Y.), quoting Reddit's own filing that it "has always authorized its partners, including Google, to protect [the licensed] content from misuse." Knowledge-panel photographs, music lyrics, and licensed user-generated content are the copyrighted components Google now says SearchGuard protects.

Why this docket matters for AI-visibility measurement

Most tools that report on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility do not get that data from Google — the official Search Console surface for generative-AI performance has no API, no query data, and no click data. The industry's working substitute is scraped SERPs, and SerpApi is one of the largest suppliers of exactly that. This case is drawing the legal boundary around the supply chain.

• The July ruling is, so far, a structural point in scrapers' favor: circumventing an anti-bot wall is not by itself a DMCA violation when what's behind the wall isn't copyrighted. That portion is dead without leave to amend.
• Google's counter-move makes content licensing the battleground: if results are laced with licensed copyrighted material, the same scrape may look different legally. AI-visibility vendors whose dashboards depend on scraped AI Overviews inherit that uncertainty either way the amended complaint resolves.
• The Reddit angle cuts across engines: content owners who license to one AI surface are asserting the right to keep that content out of everyone else's pipelines — the same tension behind lost citations when licensing deals change. Our audits sit outside this fight — they query each engine's own API and read GSC through the official API — but any business comparing AI-visibility vendors should ask where the Google numbers come from. Check what the engines themselves say about your business rather than relying only on scraped dashboards.

No merits ruling exists yet on the amended complaint — SerpApi's response comes next on the docket, and we will report what the filings say, not what either side's press coverage says they say.