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Google’s attempt to use the DMCA against SerpApi has been cut back hard. A federal court in California dismissed Google’s core anti-circumvention claims, holding that bypassing SearchGuard to access public search results is not automatically copyright circumvention when the results do not contain protected works.

The ruling does not make scraping lawful in every context. It does make one thing harder: turning an anti-bot gate around public information into a copyright lock.

The Case

Google sued SerpApi in December 2025, accusing the search-data provider of bypassing SearchGuard to collect and resell Google search results through an API. The company argued that this violated Section 1201 of the DMCA, the anti-circumvention provision normally associated with technical locks around copyrighted works.

The court rejected the broad version of that theory. Search results are mostly public factual information. For pages without copyrighted content, the court found no protected work for SearchGuard to control access to. Those claims were dismissed without leave to amend.

A narrower path remains. Some Google results include licensed images in Knowledge Panels. On those claims, the court found Google had not shown that copyright owners authorised SearchGuard as the relevant access-control measure. Google has 21 days to try to amend that part of the complaint.

Why AI Companies Should Care

Search-result data feeds rank trackers, competitive intelligence tools, retrieval systems, and agent workflows. The AI angle is direct: as agents move from answering questions to navigating the web, public search data becomes part of the operating layer.

That creates a contradiction across the industry. The largest AI and search companies want broad access to public web data for training, indexing, and retrieval. The same companies also want stronger perimeter controls when third parties scrape their own surfaces. This ruling narrows one route for doing that through copyright law.

The Boundary

The decision is not an open invitation to ignore technical controls. Contract claims, trespass theories, computer misuse statutes, rate limits, and claims tied to actual copyrighted material can still matter. The court did not bless unrestricted scraping.

But the DMCA is a specific weapon. It requires a protected work and a technological measure that controls access to that work. Public search listings are a poor fit for that theory. If Google wants to wall off those results, it may need to rely on product controls and contracts rather than copyright circumvention.

That matters because the next wave of scraping fights will not be about classic SEO tools alone. It will be about AI agents, model providers, browser assistants, and data brokers all trying to measure and reuse the same public web surfaces.