A 63-page pleading filed in Manhattan on August 28, 2026 turns Reddit's own investor calls, regulatory filings and policy pages into the evidentiary spine of an antitrust case against it, alleging the platform served one crawler instruction file to Google and a different one to everybody else.

SerpApi, LLC filed its answer and counterclaims to Reddit's first amended complaint in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on August 28, 2026, in Case No. 25-cv-8736 before Judge Paul A. Engelmayer. The document does two things at once. It denies the substance of Reddit's circumvention claims, and it opens a second front: two counts under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, plus four requests for declaratory judgment, seeking treble damages, injunctive relief and costs under Sections 4 and 16 of the Clayton Act.

The filing arrives roughly ten months after Reddit sued SerpApi, Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI on October 22, 2025, alleging the defendants bypassed technological controls to harvest Reddit posts from search results pages. It also arrives four days after SerpApi asked a California court to end Google's parallel scraping case with prejudice.

Two files, one internet

The factual core of the counterclaims is narrow and testable. According to the pleading, Reddit serves one robots.txt file to Google that permits crawling of reddit.com, and a different robots.txt file to every other search engine and agent that prohibits the same activity.

SerpApi dates the split to July 1, 2024. On June 25, 2024, Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee posted notice in the r/redditdev community that a new file would take effect at the start of the following month. The pleading reproduces its operative text: a comment line stating that Reddit believes in an open internet but not the misuse of public content, followed by a wildcard user-agent directive and a blanket disallow.

The counterclaims name the casualties. Microsoft's Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek and Qwant lost the ability to index new Reddit conversations from that date. Microsoft publicly confirmed that Bing stopped crawling Reddit on the July 1 change. Mojeek chief executive Colin Hayhurst described the effect, in language the pleading quotes, as "killing everything for search but Google."

Verification came three days later. On July 4, 2024, a managing director at the technical consultancy Merj used Google's own Rich Results testing tool to fetch Reddit's raw response as Googlebot actually receives it. The results, published on Merj's blog and now cited in a federal pleading, showed that Google was being served a different file, one that still permitted indexing.

Reddit had also promised an exemption. Lee's June 2024 post stated that organisations such as the Internet Archive would continue to be allowed to crawl. According to the counterclaims, Reddit cut off the non-profit archive in August 2025, roughly a year later.

The six-month gap

Reddit's surviving claims rest on Google's SearchGuard, the JavaScript challenge system that separates human visitors from automated software. Reddit characterises SearchGuard as a technological control measure protecting its users' copyrights. SerpApi's answer identifies a chronology problem with that characterisation.

By Reddit's own admission in the litigation, no purported technological control measure was in place between July 1, 2024, when every non-Google crawler was locked out, and January 2025, when Google deployed SearchGuard. That leaves approximately six months during which the exclusion operated with no copyright-protection mechanism behind it. The pleading treats the gap as evidence that the exclusion was commercial rather than protective.

The sixth counterclaim goes further, seeking a declaration that Reddit has no cognisable claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and therefore no civil conspiracy claim, for any period before January 2025. It grounds that request in a concession made by Reddit's own counsel during oral argument on SerpApi's motion to dismiss: "We're just not alleging that in the 2024 time period that these are cognizable claims under the DMCA."

Three of Reddit's original counts against SerpApi are already gone. The court's July 31, 2026 order, entered as ECF No. 104, dismissed Count III under 17 U.S.C. 1201(b), Count IV for unfair competition and Count V for unjust enrichment. The answer records no response to those paragraphs. What remains against SerpApi is the anti-circumvention count under Section 1201(a)(1)(A), the trafficking count under Section 1201(a)(2), and civil conspiracy.

What the filing says about who owns the posts

The licensing argument runs through both the defences and the counterclaims. Under Reddit's user agreement, users retain ownership rights in their content, and Reddit holds a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable and sublicensable licence. Reddit's privacy policy tells users that by using the services they are directing the company to share the information publicly and freely. Its public content policy states that most of the platform is public and accessible without an account, and that this is intentional.

SerpApi's eighth defence builds an express and implied licence theory on that structure. Reddit exercised its sublicensing right by granting programmatic access to Google and to OpenAI. Those companies are, in the pleading's construction, Reddit Licensees. Where SerpApi's customers are themselves Reddit Licensees, the argument runs, SerpApi acts as a tool at their direction to obtain content they are already authorised to access. Section 1201(a)(3)(A) defines circumvention as avoiding a technological measure without the authority of the copyright owner. The three declaratory judgment counts numbered III through V ask the court to find that authorised access cannot become circumvention because of the instrument used to request it.

The pleading also puts a number on authorship: Reddit users contribute more than 99.99% of the content the platform hosts, with Reddit's own posts numbering in the tens of thousands against a corpus of billions.

The market SerpApi says was closed

The Sherman Act counts require a market definition, and the counterclaims offer two. The primary definition is the market for the sale of large-scale, authentic human conversational data in online threaded discussion forums organised by topic, for use in search indexing and in the training and grounding of AI systems. The alternative is the market for online public discourse. The geographic market is the United States, or in the alternative the world.

Substitutability is argued from Reddit's own marketing. The pleading cites the company's chief financial officer describing the platform as "1-of-1" and chief executive Steve Huffman stating that large language models "would not exist as we know them without Reddit." Micro-blogging services impose length limits that discourage sustained argument, the counterclaims contend, while Meta's properties centre on personal sharing rather than language-based engagement. Upvotes function as a relevance signal that raw text scraping does not produce.

Three quotations from Reddit's own investor communications carry most of the intent argument. Executives told an earnings call that scarce assets tend to become valuable over time and that Reddit's conversations are "like oil for the modern internet." Huffman, quoted from a 2023 interview, said the Reddit corpus of data is really valuable and that the company does not need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free. And Reddit's S-1, filed February 22, 2024, warned investors that some companies may decline to license Reddit data and use it without a licence given its open nature.

February 22, 2024 is the hinge date in the pleading. Reddit filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission and announced its expanded Google partnership on the same day. Both companies described the arrangement publicly in terms of the open internet. To investors, according to third-party reporting cited in the filing, the strategic objective was positioning the company as a data supplier to large AI ecosystems and moving away from a revenue stream dependent on page views. The counterclaims put the reported value of that arrangement at $60 million per year.

The document Reddit has not produced

Exhibit 4 to the answer is a placeholder. SerpApi states that Reddit has refused to provide any partnership agreement with Google, despite referring to the agreement in its complaint and despite representing that it would be produced "almost immediately as one of the first documents" in discovery.

SerpApi attaches the unproduced agreement by reference so that it will appear as an exhibit once handed over, and asserts on information and belief that it does not authorise Google to enforce Reddit's copyrights or its users' copyrights. A footnote adds a detail sourced from the other case: in Google's amended complaint against SerpApi, filed in the Northern District of California on August 10, 2026, Google alleges that its agreement with Reddit directs it not to enable third parties to extract and independently commercialise the licensed content. That amended filing, anchored in licensing terms, followed the July 20, 2026 dismissal of every claim in Google's original complaint.

The same footnote notes something else absent from the record. There is no announcement in Reddit's press release archive that mentions SearchGuard, and the only press release addressing protection against scraping, published August 5, 2026, refers neither to technological control measures nor to Google.

Who SerpApi says its customers are

The answer discloses a customer list. Named accounts without confidentiality restrictions include Salesforce, Adobe, NVIDIA, Samsung, Shopify, KPMG, Experian, Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters, the United Nations and the New York Times, which the filing states has used SerpApi's services for its AI initiatives and in regular operations. Several top providers of large language models and enterprise productivity software are also customers, unnamed because of confidentiality obligations. The company reports more than 1.5 million activated user accounts.

The pleading adds a detail calculated to complicate both plaintiffs' positions: Reddit employees hold SerpApi accounts registered to reddit.com work addresses, and Google employees hold accounts registered to google.com addresses. SerpApi avers on information and belief that both groups use the service in the course of their employment.

A second product surfaces in the antitrust theory. SerpApi's Search Index API consults an independently assembled index of web content rather than querying a third-party engine at request time. The filing states plainly that reddit.com is not currently in that index. The alleged injury follows directly: but for the robots.txt exclusion, SerpApi would crawl Reddit directly with that product and compete in the market for structured Reddit data.

Numbers that do not quite line up

The counterclaims state that Reddit's advertising business generated $762 million in revenues in the second quarter of 2026. PPC Land's coverage of those results recorded $762 million as the advertising line specifically, with total revenue of $804.9 million and a 12.49% after-hours share price fall driven by search referral exposure rather than by the advertising numbers. The pleading's phrasing collapses the distinction.

Other figures are consistent with the public record. Reddit's 2025 Form 10-K reported an average of 121.4 million daily active uniques globally in the three months ended December 31, 2025, and described the platform as one of the internet's largest corpuses of information. Reddit reached over 500 million people weekly across more than 25 billion posts and comments. Around 40% of Reddit conversations are commercial in nature.

The counterclaims quantify nothing on the other side. No damages figure appears. SerpApi states that its losses are calculable by reference to its own financial records and the prices Reddit itself has set, and leaves the amount to trial.

Why this matters to buyers and publishers

The dispute is technically about robots.txt, but commercially it is about whether a platform can price access to content it does not own. That question has moved from theory to operational planning across the publishing industry over the past year.

Reddit's referral position is deteriorating in ways the company has described on the record. Huffman told analysts in July 2026 that AI Overviews had yet to deliver a comparable positive impact to the ten blue links, a comment the counterclaims cite alongside his description of referral traffic as choppy and volatile. Reddit has been named among publishers weighing whether to block Google's crawler entirely as referrals decline, and separate reporting has documented the platform losing search visibility across two 2026 algorithm updates.

For search marketers, the practical stake is the supply of rank-tracking and competitive-intelligence data. Access has already tightened once, when Google eliminated the num=100 parameter on September 14, 2025 and multiplied collection costs tenfold for tools that depended on it. A ruling that a bot-detection system qualifies as a copyright access control would extend that tightening from a technical restriction to a legal one, with statutory damages attached.

For publishers, the counterclaims cut both ways. The pleading invokes hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn through X Corp. v. Bright Data for the proposition that letting platforms decide on any basis who may collect publicly available data risks creating information monopolies that disserve the public interest. That reasoning protects scrapers. It also constrains publishers who have spent two years building crawler-blocking infrastructure, and research covered by PPC Land found that publishers who blocked generative AI crawlers experienced a 23.1% decline in log-monthly visits.

Two federal courts are now reading closely related conduct in opposite directions. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's claims in California on July 20, 2026, finding SearchGuard guards advertising revenue rather than copyright. Judge Engelmayer allowed Reddit's core anti-circumvention theory to proceed in New York in late July. The divergence turns on how each plaintiff pleaded ownership and authorisation, not on any disagreement about what scraping is.

What each side says

SerpApi General Counsel Chad Anson stated: "We filed our answer to Reddit's complaint along with counterclaims under antitrust law. Reddit's users own the content they create and Reddit's own policies tell them it will be shared publicly and freely. As it prepared for its IPO, Reddit abandoned this promise. It granted exclusive access to Google and has spent two years charging Google and others for content it does not own."

Anson added: "SerpApi exists because the open internet is enormous and disorganized, and because turning public information into something a program can actually use is important for innovation and genuinely hard work. We do not sell access to Reddit content. Our customers already have access to Reddit content, just like everyone else. We sell structure."

Chief executive Julien Khaleghy published a blog post on August 31, 2026 framing the filing in similar terms. "Robots.txt isn't a copyright protection mechanism," he wrote, adding that if the case had been about protecting copyright, "the protection would have come first. It didn't." The post discloses that the Internet Archive has been a recipient of charitable contributions from SerpApi.

Reddit has not filed a response to the counterclaims. The company's position, as set out in its amended complaint and summarised in its earlier pleadings, is that the defendants circumvented technological measures protecting copyrighted material, and that the resulting harm includes lost licensing revenue, reputational damage and the cost of anti-scraping infrastructure. Nothing in the counterclaims has been tested. A case management conference is scheduled for October 1, 2026.

Timeline

  • 2005 - Reddit founded as a "default open" platform where participation was open to everyone
  • June 2008 - Reddit open-sources its codebase on GitHub, where it remains public until archived in September 2017
  • April 2023 - Reddit announces API policy changes, introducing tiered pricing at $0.24 per 1,000 calls for high-volume users
  • June 12, 2023 - Nearly 9,000 Reddit communities go dark in protest at the new API terms
  • February 22, 2024 - Reddit files its S-1 and announces an expanded Google partnership the same day, reportedly worth $60 million per year
  • June 25, 2024 - Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee posts notice of the incoming robots.txt change, promising the Internet Archive will keep crawling
  • July 1, 2024 - The requester-specific robots.txt goes live; Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek and Qwant lose the ability to index new Reddit conversations
  • July 4, 2024 - Merj tests Reddit's response as Googlebot and finds a different file being served
  • January 2025 - Google deploys SearchGuard, six months after the exclusion took effect
  • August 2025 - Reddit cuts off the Internet Archive
  • September 14, 2025 - Google eliminates the num=100 SERP parameter, multiplying data collection costs for search tools
  • October 22, 2025 - Reddit sues SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI in the Southern District of New York
  • December 19, 2025 - Google files its own DMCA complaint against SerpApi in the Northern District of California
  • January 23, 2026 - SerpApi General Counsel Chad Anson publishes a public response to the Google lawsuit
  • February 6, 2026 - Reddit files its first amended complaint
  • March 13, 2026 - SerpApi files a renewed motion to dismiss Reddit's amended complaint
  • July 20, 2026 - Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismisses every claim in Google's complaint
  • July 30, 2026 - Reddit reports $762 million in Q2 2026 advertising revenue as shares fall 12.49% after hours
  • July 31, 2026 - The court dismisses Counts III, IV and V against SerpApi in ECF No. 104
  • August 5, 2026 - Reddit publishes a press release on infrastructure and moderation tools that does not mention SearchGuard
  • August 10, 2026 - Google files an amended complaint anchored in licensing agreements
  • August 24, 2026 - SerpApi moves to dismiss the amended Google complaint with prejudice
  • August 28, 2026 - SerpApi files its answer and antitrust counterclaims against Reddit
  • August 31, 2026 - Julien Khaleghy publishes SerpApi's public statement on the filing
  • October 1, 2026 - Case management conference scheduled

Summary

Who: SerpApi, LLC, an Austin-based search-data provider founded in 2017 by chief executive Julien Khaleghy, represented by Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, filed against Reddit, Inc. (NYSE: RDDT), led by co-founder and chief executive Steve Huffman. General Counsel Chad Anson spoke for SerpApi. Co-defendants Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI, Inc. remain in the underlying case.

What: A 63-page answer and counterclaims denying Reddit's DMCA circumvention and civil conspiracy allegations, asserting eighteen defences including copyright misuse, unclean hands, licence and estoppel, and adding six counterclaims: monopolisation and attempted monopolisation under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and four declaratory judgment counts. Remedies sought include treble damages, an injunction against requester-specific robots.txt directives and against exclusive crawl agreements, and a declaration that no cognisable DMCA claim exists before January 2025.

When: Filed August 28, 2026. The conduct at issue runs from February 22, 2024, when Reddit filed its S-1 and announced the Google partnership, through July 1, 2024, when the requester-specific robots.txt took effect, to January 2025, when Google deployed SearchGuard. A case management conference is set for October 1, 2026.

Where: United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Case No. 25-cv-8736, before Judge Paul A. Engelmayer and Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses. The relevant geographic market pleaded is the United States, or in the alternative the world.

Why: SerpApi contends Reddit converted a default-open platform into a pay-to-play one to monetise content its own user agreement leaves with its users, foreclosing rival search engines and independent data providers while charging supra-competitive prices to the few able to pay. Reddit contends the defendants circumvented technological measures protecting copyrighted material. The outcome will shape whether bot-detection systems can function as copyright access controls, and whether platforms can lawfully grant one crawler exclusive access to public content.