A federal judge in California has dismissed every claim in Google's copyright lawsuit against search-data provider SerpApi, ruling on July 20, 2026 that the anti-bot system at the center of the case does not protect copyrighted work in the way the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss, dividing her order between claims she killed outright and claims Google may attempt to revive within 21 days.

The decision lands in a dispute that reaches well beyond two companies. SerpApi sells access to Google search results through an application programming interface, and its output feeds the rank trackers, competitive-intelligence dashboards, and keyword tools that marketers rely on daily. The question the court took up - whether a platform can use copyright law to wall off a database of publicly visible search listings - carries direct weight for anyone whose work depends on measuring what appears on a results page.

What the court decided

The order resolves defendant SerpApi LLC's motion to dismiss all claims in a complaint that Google LLC filed on December 19, 2025. Google had asserted two claims under Section 1201 of the DMCA. The first, under 17 U.S.C. section 1201(a)(1)(A), targeted SerpApi's alleged circumvention of a Google system called SearchGuard to reach search results. The second, under 17 U.S.C. section 1201(a)(2), targeted SerpApi's provision of a service whose purpose, Google argued, was that same circumvention.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers granted the motion on two separate tracks. Where SearchGuard controls access to search results that contain no copyrighted content at all, she dismissed both claims without leave to amend, holding that amendment would be futile because the claims fail as a matter of law. Where the results include a copyrighted component inside a Knowledge Panel, she dismissed both claims with leave to amend, giving Google a narrow path to try again. The court also denied as moot SerpApi's motion to stay discovery, denied Google's request to compel discovery responses, and stayed discovery until any amended complaint is resolved.

That split matters. The portion Google cannot refile covers the ordinary case: a search results page that displays organized links and text drawn from across the web. The portion Google may refile is confined to the narrower situation in which a licensed image or other copyrighted item happens to sit in a Knowledge Panel on the page.

At the heart of the ruling is a mismatch between what SearchGuard does and what the DMCA protects. To state a claim under either subsection, Google had to show that SearchGuard "effectively controls access to a work protected under this title," meaning a work protected under the Copyright Act. The court found that Google's own pleading undercut that requirement.

Google described its search results as compilations of publicly available information gathered from the internet and arranged by relevance. It alleged that those results are "often" accompanied by a Knowledge Panel that "may contain some copyrighted content." According to the order, Google did not allege that the Knowledge Panel is always present, or that when present it always contains copyrighted material. The judge read this as an admission that search results are a mix, some carrying copyrighted content and some not.

From that mix followed the first dismissal. As the order puts it, "To the extent that Google Search results do not contain any copyrighted content, SearchGuard cannot be said to effectively control access to a work protected under the Copyright Act." Because the DMCA does not reach works that are not copyrighted, those claims fail as a matter of law, and the court dismissed them permanently.

A second and independent flaw sank the remaining claims. Section 1201(a)(3)(B) requires that a protective measure operate "with the authority of the copyright owner." The court found that Google never alleged facts showing SearchGuard was implemented and functions to guard the copyrighted images in a Knowledge Panel with the permission of whoever owns those images. Citing the Ninth Circuit's decision in the Blizzard case, the judge noted that a valid access-control measure must be put in place by the copyright owner or with that owner's authority. Google's argument that its licenses to display the images implied such authority did not persuade the court, because Google pleaded no facts about the terms of those licensing agreements. On that basis, the court dismissed the Knowledge Panel claims as well, though it left the door open for Google to plead the missing facts.

The judge was careful to reject several of SerpApi's other arguments. Google's claims were not dismissed for lack of standing; the court concluded that the DMCA's "zone of interests" is not limited to owners and exclusive licensees of copyrighted material, pointing to statutory language that lets "[a]ny person injured by a violation" of Section 1201 or 1202 bring suit. Nor were the claims dismissed on the ground that SerpApi never circumvented SearchGuard. The court found that Google adequately alleged circumvention, describing how SerpApi allegedly masks its automated queries to appear human and syndicates a solved challenge to browsers that never solved it. And the court rejected SerpApi's contention that a Section 1201(a)(2) claim requires the defendant to "sell" circumvention technology, holding that manufacturing or providing such a service is enough.

In other words, Google lost on the copyright-work and authorization requirements, not on the questions of who may sue or whether scraping occurred.

How SearchGuard works

The technical backdrop clarifies what was at stake. Google developed and launched SearchGuard in January 2025 as a measure to stop unauthorized parties from automatically accessing and scraping its search results. According to Google's complaint as summarized in the order, SearchGuard sends a JavaScript "challenge" to queries arriving from unrecognized sources, calling on the browser to return specific information about itself and the user. A human user's browser runs the code and answers seamlessly. Automated systems submitting queries at massive scale typically cannot solve the challenge, and SearchGuard denies them access.

Google alleged that SearchGuard blocked SerpApi's service when it launched, but that SerpApi quickly built methods to get around it. Those methods, per the complaint, involve making automated queries look as if they come from human users and passing a legitimately obtained authorization to other browsers that never completed the challenge. Google claimed harm on four fronts: the cost of answering billions of automated queries, the undermining of its investment in licensed content, the threat to its relationships with content licensors, and the expense of building stronger protections.

PPC Land reported at the time of filing that the complaint sought statutory damages ranging from $200 to $2,500 for each act of circumvention, a structure that, given the volume of queries SerpApi handles, pointed toward liability far exceeding the company's reported annual revenue of a few million dollars. Google, according to earlier PPC Land coverage, had described query volume rising as much as 25,000 percent over two years.

SerpApi's public response

SerpApi, which is based in Austin, Texas, and reports a staff of roughly 42 people, framed the outcome as a broad victory. In a blog post published today, Julien Khaleghy, the company's chief executive, wrote that the ruling marks "a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet." According to Khaleghy, "We're pleased that the court rejected Google's attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages." He added that "The internet's founding principle - open access to usable information - is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data," and said the company will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information.

The company had signaled this posture from the start of the litigation. In January 2026, SerpApi general counsel Chad Anson published a public response arguing that the DMCA "was written to protect encrypted DVDs and software from piracy, not to let platforms block access to publicly visible web content." When SerpApi filed its motion to dismiss on February 20, 2026, its lawyers pressed the point that the system's name told the story, describing it as "SearchGuard," not "CopyrightGuard." The court's reasoning tracked that framing on the copyright-work question, even as it declined to adopt SerpApi's standing and circumvention theories.

Why this matters for marketers

The stakes for the marketing community run through the plumbing of search measurement. SerpApi's product sits at the infrastructure layer beneath many of the tools that professionals use for keyword research, rank tracking, and paid-search intelligence. Had Google succeeded in recasting SearchGuard as a copyright access-control measure, scraping a results page could have been treated, in legal terms, closer to cracking DVD encryption, regardless of whether a human visitor sees the same page freely.

That prospect arrives against a year of tightening data access. In September 2025, Google eliminated the num=100 parameter that had let tools pull 100 organic results in a single request, forcing platforms to make ten requests where one had sufficed. Semrush confirmed an industry-wide operational impact and a tenfold cost increase for comprehensive result analysis. When DataForSEO built a workaround that cut costs by 80 percent, Google identified and blocked it within five days. Google also restricted SerpApi's own Light Fast API to three organic results in late September 2025.

The SerpApi litigation is one thread in a wider tangle of scraping disputes. Reddit sued SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI on October 22, 2025 in the Southern District of New York, and that complaint likewise invoked Google's SearchGuard as a control the defendants allegedly bypassed to reach Reddit content in search results. SerpApi has moved to dismiss the Reddit case on overlapping grounds, arguing that a measure allowing human users through "seamlessly" cannot be an effective access control. Separately, SerpApi is defending its own suit against a smaller rival, SearchApi, in a Texas court. The dismissal in the Google case supplies the first reasoned ruling on whether an anti-bot layer over public search results clears the DMCA's copyright threshold, and it answers no on the general case.

For now, the marketing tools that depend on search-results data face no new copyright barrier from this decision. Google has 21 days from the order to file an amended complaint confined to the Knowledge Panel theory, and only if it can allege the specific facts the court found missing about copyright ownership and authorization. Whether Google refiles, and whether a narrowed claim survives a second motion, will determine how much of the dispute remains alive.

Timeline

  • January 2025 - Google develops and launches SearchGuard to prevent automated access to and scraping of Google Search results
  • September 14, 2025 - Google eliminates the num=100 SERP parameter, forcing SEO tools to make ten requests where one previously sufficed
  • Late September 2025 - Google restricts SerpApi's Light Fast API workaround to three organic results
  • October 22, 2025 - Reddit sues SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI in the Southern District of New York
  • December 19, 2025 - Google files its DMCA lawsuit against SerpApi in the Northern District of California, Case No. 25-cv-10826-YGR
  • January 23, 2026 - SerpApi general counsel Chad Anson publishes a public response challenging the legal basis of Google's complaint
  • February 20, 2026 - SerpApi files its motion to dismiss, arguing SearchGuard is not a copyright access-control measure
  • March 23, 2026 - SerpApi files a motion to stay discovery; the court vacates the scheduled case management conference
  • April 6, 2026 - Google files its opposition to the motion to dismiss
  • May 6, 2026 - SerpApi files its reply
  • July 20, 2026 - The court grants SerpApi's motion to dismiss, dismissing the general claims without leave to amend and the Knowledge Panel claims with leave to amend
  • July 21, 2026 - SerpApi publishes a blog post announcing the ruling

Summary

Who: Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ruling in a case between Google LLC and SerpApi LLC, an Austin-based search-data provider led by chief executive Julien Khaleghy.

What: The court granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss both DMCA claims. It dismissed the claims covering search results without copyrighted content permanently, and dismissed the claims covering copyrighted content in Knowledge Panels with leave to amend, finding that SearchGuard does not effectively control access to a copyrighted work and was not shown to operate with the authority of the copyright owner.

When: The order was filed on July 20, 2026, and SerpApi announced it publicly on July 21, 2026. The underlying lawsuit was filed on December 19, 2025.

Where: The United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. 25-cv-10826-YGR.

Why: Google sought to use Section 1201 of the DMCA to stop SerpApi from scraping and reselling its search results. The court found that Google's own allegations showed the results are a mix of copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, that SearchGuard's purpose is to regulate automated access rather than protect copyrighted work, and that Google failed to plead authorization from the copyright owners of the images it cited.