SerpApi Files Motion to Dismiss Google's Complaint

AUSTIN, Texas, March 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On Friday, February 20, 2026, SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss Google's complaint that was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, arguing that "Google's suit never gets out of the starting gate."

In January, SerpApi stated that it would fight Google's lawsuit to protect its business model and the researchers and innovators who depend on SerpApi's technology. In filing the motion to dismiss, SerpApi expanded on its reasons for fighting the lawsuit.

"Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world," SerpApi founder and CEO Julien Khaleghy wrote in a blog post published after the filing. "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission."

Google's complaint invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to stop SerpApi from accessing its website. In its motion to dismiss, SerpApi argues that the act "was not designed" to stop companies like SerpApi from accessing public websites. "Public website operators like Google do not fall within [the] ambit" of the DMCA … Google does not hold a copyright in its search results," SerpApi argues. "Google's suit is forbidden by the statute's plain text."

According to the motion, Google's own complaint admits that the company's bot-detection and anti-scraping technologies exist to protect its advertising business, not any alleged copyright interest. In contrast, SerpApi claims, the DMCA protects "technological measures that effectively control access to a work." Google's search results don't distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted content, SerpApi argues, and every piece of underlying information Google surfaces remains fully available on the original public websites it scraped.

To support its motion, SerpApi cites the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., which warned against the creation of "information monopolies that would disserve the public interest," along with the Sixth Circuit's decision in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark, which explained that that the DMCA cannot apply to otherwise readily accessible works, "just as one would not say that a lock on the back door of a house controls access to a house whose front door does not contain a lock."

"We are not asking courts to break new ground," said Khaleghy. "The law is already on our side."

"SerpApi was started because we believe in the importance of a free and open internet, with public information easily accessible to all," Khaleghy stated in the blog post accompanying the filing. "These beliefs are deeply rooted in American culture and American jurisprudence, dating back to the passage of the First Amendment. And these beliefs have not changed. If anything, Google's lawsuit has strengthened our conviction."

SerpApi's motion to dismiss is available here: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-why-were-in-the-right/

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SOURCE SerpApi, LLC