Google DMCA Claims Against SerpApi Partly Dismissed by Court

Did Google win its scraping lawsuit against SerpApi? Not entirely. A federal court dismissed key parts of the case on July 20, 2026, and this matters right now because it shapes how much power search companies have to block third-party tools from collecting public search data.

What the court decided in the Google DMCA claims against SerpApi case

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss both of Google’s claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that protects copyrighted works online. The court split the claims by content type. Any part of Google’s case tied to Search results without copyrighted content got thrown out for good. The parts tied to Search results that did include copyrighted content also got dismissed, but the court gave Google a chance to fix the problem.

Why the Google DMCA claims against SerpApi fell short on SearchGuard

Google built its case around SearchGuard, its anti-scraping system. The court said Google never showed that SearchGuard operated “with the authority of the copyright owner,” meaning Google didn’t prove the copyright holders behind the content actually authorized Google to protect it this way. Without that proof, the DMCA claims don’t hold up. The court noted this information should already sit in Google’s own records, so Google has no excuse for leaving it out.

Google’s 21-day window to fix its claims

Google now has 21 days from July 20 to file an amended complaint. Any revision cannot contradict what Google already claimed in its original filing. The court also paused discovery, the process where both sides exchange evidence, until Google either amends its complaint or the case gets resolved another way. This pause means the lawsuit stays in a holding pattern for now. Cases like this are a reminder of how fragile any strategy built entirely on scraped or borrowed search data can be, especially when the legal ground underneath it keeps shifting.

SerpApi’s response and where it still lost ground

SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy called the ruling “a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet.” SerpApi said the court rejected Google’s attempt to use the DMCA to control access to public web pages. But SerpApi didn’t win on every point. The court rejected SerpApi’s argument that Google lacked standing, meaning the legal right to bring the claims, because Google didn’t say it owned or held exclusive licenses to the search result content. The court also found Google alleged enough facts to suggest SerpApi got around SearchGuard in the first place.

Background on the Google DMCA claims against SerpApi lawsuit

Google filed this lawsuit on December 19, accusing SerpApi of bypassing SearchGuard and scraping Google Search results to resell the data. SerpApi moved to dismiss on February 20, arguing Google was stretching the DMCA to restrict access to public search results and that Google didn’t own the underlying content shown in those results. The July 20 ruling addressed both sides of that argument, and neither side got everything it wanted.

Watch for Google’s amended complaint within the 21-day deadline, since that filing will show whether Google can prove copyright owners actually authorized SearchGuard to protect their content. If Google can’t back that up, this part of the case ends for good. Anyone building or using tools that pull data from search results should follow this case closely, because the outcome will affect how much access those tools can legally have. As access to scraped search data becomes legally murkier, businesses may want to double down on sustainable, above-board visibility strategies like earning legitimate backlinks through resources such as The Link Chest, rather than depending on third-party tools whose data access could vanish overnight.