Did you hear about Google suing SerpAI? Yes, the same company that OpenAI and Perplexity use in their AI chat products.

It's not as simple as scraping SERPs. If that was the case, we'd see SEMRush, Ahrefs, and a gaggle of companies named in the complaint. Instead, this case hinges on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Section 1201, often referred to as the "Anti-Circumvention" provision, prohibits the circumvention of digital locks used to protect copyrighted material. Rather than just making copyright infringement (like piracy) illegal, Section 1201 makes it illegal to even bypass the technology—such as encryption or password protection—that guards that content.

Fun fact– Section 1201 is how we ended up with the ubiquitous broken McDonald's ice cream machines! It was illegal for a McDonald's location to try and fix it themselves or call a local handyman to take care of it for them. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office hold a public hearing to grant temporary exemptions. McDonald's and John Deere both benefitted from the 2024 Right to Repair exemption to Section 1201.

Changes to copyright law lead to surprisingly tangible results.

Google's frosty complaint against SerpAI originates from a technology the company launched in January 2025 called SearchGuard. SearchGuard is a defensive security system with a primary purpose is to distinguish between a real human using a browser and an automated bot trying to scrape data. (We saw this rollout when JS was required to use Google Search.) It's basically a JavaScript Challenge system.

Google isn't suing because SerpApi scraped public data. They are suing because SerpApi allegedly reverse-engineered "SearchGuard", a specific security protocol.

The filing is a read. "SerpApi’s business model is parasitic." They use SerpAI's own marketing materials in their argument. "According to SerpApi’s blog, its services include default features to “avoid being detected and blocked by Google,” including the “latest technologies to mimic human behavior… Google estimates that SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of artificial search requests each day to Google. Over the last two years, that volume has increased by as much as 25,000%."

If Google wins this suit, it may open the door to further legal actions– but more directly, it will undermine ChatGPT, a SerpAI customer and a major competitor in the AI space. It's fair to point out that Google built its trillion-dollar empire by scraping the entire web, but is now using the DMCA to stop others from scraping them.

The thing you most need to pay attention to here: This case will decide if a simple bot-blocker (like a JavaScript challenge or CAPTCHA) counts as a "technological protection measure" under the DMCA. If it does, almost any scraping of any website could technically become a federal crime.

Godspeed, my fellow future criminals.