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Court Dismisses Google's DMCA Lawsuit Against SerpApi Over Search Scraping

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A gavel spanning the full width of the image divides a broken padlock barrier above from an intact search results page below.
Illustration: AI-generated.

A US federal court has dismissed the copyright claims at the centre of Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that sells programmatic access to search results data. The decision, reported on 22 July 2026, grants SerpApi’s motion to dismiss and removes the main legal theory Google had used to argue that scraping its search results is unlawful.

Google filed the suit in December 2025, alleging that SerpApi bypassed SearchGuard, Google’s anti-scraping technology, in order to collect and resell Google Search results. The complaint leaned on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), specifically its anti-circumvention provisions, which make it unlawful to defeat a technical measure that controls access to a copyrighted work.

What did the court actually decide?

Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, dismissed both of Google’s anti-circumvention claims. The reasoning turns on a narrow but important point: the DMCA protects access controls over copyrighted works, and a Google results page made up of organised links and short snippets drawn from across the web is not, in the court’s view, a copyrighted work that Google owns.

On that basis, bypassing an access control to reach results that contain no copyrighted content is not circumvention within the meaning of the statute. The court dismissed that part of the case with no opportunity to refile, meaning Google cannot revive the argument that scraping an ordinary results page violates the DMCA.

The court left one narrower avenue open. Google has 21 days to amend its complaint in relation to results that include a genuinely copyrighted component, for example a licensed image sitting inside a Knowledge Panel. That is a far smaller claim than the one Google brought, and it does not touch the ordinary case of a results page of links and text.

Not on its own. The ruling knocks out a copyright-based theory; it does not bless scraping as a general practice. Data collection from a platform can still be challenged on other grounds, such as breach of the site’s terms of service or other statutes, and none of those questions were settled here. What the court rejected is the specific idea that defeating an anti-scraping control to reach uncopyrighted results is a DMCA violation.

The distinction matters because it separates two things Google’s suit had bundled together: the act of getting past a technical barrier, and the ownership of what lies behind it. The court held that the first is only unlawful under the DMCA when the second involves a copyrighted work.

What this means for SEO

Rank tracking and SERP data underpin a large part of the SEO tooling market. Position trackers, keyword tools and SERP feature monitors all rely, directly or through intermediaries, on collecting what appears on Google’s results pages at scale. A ruling that Google cannot use the DMCA to treat that collection as circumvention removes one legal cloud over the practice, at least in this case and in this jurisdiction.

It would be a mistake to read it as a green light. The decision is a single district-court ruling, it may yet be amended or appealed in its narrower part, and it does not address the contractual and other legal questions that also govern data collection. For SEO practitioners the practical takeaway is modest but real: the legal footing under the tools that gather SERP data looks a little steadier than it did when Google filed, while the wider question of what platforms can do to control access to public results remains unsettled.

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