Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
-Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
-Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
-Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.

What Google is saying. 'Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all,' Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping 'brazen' and 'unlawful.' Google said SerpApi's activity 'increased dramatically over the past year.' If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.