Google returned to the Northern District of California on August 10, 2026 with an amended complaint against SerpApi, using the final day of a 21-day window granted by the judge who had thrown out its original case three weeks earlier. The new filing rebuilds the lawsuit around a single missing element: written permission from copyright owners to guard their content.

The document, entered as Docket No. 45 in Case No. 4:25-cv-10826-YGR, runs to 15 pages, two more than the complaint it replaces. Its structure is largely unchanged. Its centre of gravity is not.

Where the December 2025 filing described a broad injury to Google's search business, the August filing narrows to a single legal question the court identified as fatal, and answers it with fresh factual allegations about what Google promised its content licensors, what those licensors demanded in return, and when.

What the court left standing

On July 20, 2026, Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed every claim in the original complaint, splitting her order into two tracks. Claims covering search results that contain no copyrighted content at all were dismissed without leave to amend, on the reasoning that amendment would be futile because those claims fail as a matter of law. Claims covering search results that do contain a copyrighted component inside a Knowledge Panel were dismissed with leave to amend.

That second track is the one Google has now walked back through. The order was specific about what was missing. Section 1201(a)(3)(B) of the Copyright Act requires that a technological measure operate "with the authority of the copyright owner" before it can be said to effectively control access to a protected work. According to the order, Google "does not allege any facts that raise the inference that SearchGuard was implemented and functions to control access to copyrighted components that may be included in Google Search results 'with the authority of the copyright owner[s].'"

Google had argued that its licences to display images in Knowledge Panels implied that authority. The court declined the inference. According to the order, Google "does not allege any facts regarding the terms of the licensing agreements that govern its use of any of the copyrighted content in the Knowledge Panel," and therefore the court could not reasonably infer that those agreements granted Google authorisation to deploy access controls.

Two of the arguments SerpApi pressed hardest were rejected. The court held that the DMCA's zone of interests is not limited to owners and exclusive licensees, citing the statutory language permitting suit by "[a]ny person injured by a violation" of Sections 1201 or 1202. It also found that Google had adequately alleged circumvention. Those rulings survive into the amended pleading and shape what Google needed to fix, which was narrow.

The paragraphs that did not exist before

The amended complaint inserts four new paragraphs, numbered 30 through 33, under the heading covering SearchGuard. They are the substance of the refiling.

Paragraph 30 states that copyright holders have authorised Google to implement access controls like SearchGuard for the content they license, "and in some cases insisted that Google do so." It then describes, without naming the counterparty, an agreement with "a prominent licensing partner that holds copyrights to millions of works." Versions of that agreement date back to 2017, according to the filing, and under it Google is "not only authorized, it is obligated to use commercially reasonable efforts to safeguard the licensed content against unauthorized third-party access."

A second unnamed party appears in the same paragraph. According to the complaint, "another major content provider requires that Google ensure the content it licenses will not be available for download by third parties, thereby authorizing the implementation of technical access controls."

Neither licensor is identified. The pleading standard set by the court concerned the existence and terms of authorisation rather than the identity of the counterparties, and Google has supplied dates and obligations without supplying names.

Reddit moves from victim to witness

Paragraph 31 does name a partner. Google describes a licensing agreement with Reddit covering the copyrighted content of both the platform and its users. According to the complaint, that agreement "directs Google not to enable third parties to extract and independently commercialize the licensed content, making clear Google has the authorization to prevent such behavior through access control mechanisms such as SearchGuard."

Google then borrows from its adversary's adversary. The filing quotes Reddit's own first amended complaint in the Southern District of New York, at paragraph 111: "Reddit has always authorized its partners, including Google, to protect [the licensed] content from misuse and prevent unauthorized access to that data."

Paragraph 32 goes further, alleging that when Reddit suspected scrapers were reselling content it had licensed to Google, "it specifically asked Google to employ technical measures to prevent such unauthorized appropriation." Google's original December complaint mentioned Reddit only once, as a content partner that had already sued SerpApi. In the amended version Reddit is the evidentiary spine of the authorisation theory.

Reddit sued SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI on October 22, 2025, invoking Google's SearchGuard as a control the defendants allegedly bypassed. The amended complaint now cites that case by docket number and ECF entry.

A privacy policy as an access-control mandate

Paragraph 33 introduces an argument with no equivalent in the original. Google says its Privacy Policy, which users accept when using Google services, describes how the company will handle user information including uploaded content such as photos and reviews. Under that policy, according to the filing, Google says it will protect such content from "unauthorized access" and generally enable users to remove it. SearchGuard is characterised as one way Google attempts to honour that undertaking.

The move converts a consumer-facing document into a source of authorisation from the individual users who own the copyright in their own photographs and reviews. Whether a privacy policy constitutes authorisation from a copyright owner within the meaning of Section 1201(a)(3)(B) is untested. The court's July order did not address it, because Google had not raised it.

A backstop appears in the causes of action. New paragraph 44 states: "To the extent Google needs authorization from copyright holders to implement a technological measure like SearchGuard, Google had and has such authorization." The conditional framing preserves Google's position that no such authorisation is legally required, while pleading it anyway.

What Google quietly removed

Subtraction is as informative as addition here. The original complaint devoted a paragraph to "[o]ther search-related services featuring copyrighted content," naming Google Shopping, where merchants supply product images, and Google Maps, where Google displays terrestrial pictures, business imagery and user-generated reviews. A later paragraph alleged that SerpApi offered focused scraping services for both.

The court dealt with those allegations in a footnote, observing that Google had not alleged Maps or Shopping to be part of Google Search or Search results, and that they "appear to be irrelevant to Google's claims under the DMCA."

Both references are gone. In their place, paragraph 18 of the amended complaint lists categories rather than products: search results featuring licensed content now include "those containing music lyrics, merchant-supplied product and business images and descriptions, and all manner of user-generated content." The material is the same. The framing keeps everything inside Google Search, where the DMCA claims live.

Google also added a second Knowledge Panel exhibit. Alongside the Willie Mays example carried over from December, the amended complaint reproduces a Babe Ruth panel displaying a licensed image credited to the Donaldson Collection and Getty Images, with a "Licensed by Google" label visible in the screenshot. The addition targets the court's observation that Google had shown a panel in which only one of several displayed images was copyrighted.

A further edit sharpens the contrast Google wants drawn between itself and the defendant. Paragraph 3 now states that "[u]nlike Google, SerpApi does not crawl content from the public web in compliance with sites' permissions, or contract with licensors to obtain content or add any value to it." Paragraph 21 adds that SerpApi "is also not subject to agreements with rights holders to honor deletions or removals of content," an allegation that tracks the reputational injury theory Reddit has advanced in New York.

The technical case is unchanged

Nothing in the amended complaint alters the mechanics at issue. SearchGuard launched in January 2025. It sends a JavaScript challenge to queries arriving from unrecognised sources, requiring the browser to return specific information about itself and the user. Human browsers solve it seamlessly. Automated systems operating at scale typically cannot, and are denied access.

Google alleges SearchGuard blocked SerpApi at launch, and that SerpApi built workarounds within weeks. Those workarounds, per the filing, involve misrepresenting the device, software or location a query comes from, and syndicating a legitimately obtained authorisation to unauthorised machines so their "fake browsers" appear approved. SerpApi also uses automated means to bypass CAPTCHAs, which the complaint describes as another aspect of SearchGuard.

The scale figures are carried over verbatim. Google estimates SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of artificial search requests each day, with volume rising by as much as 25,000% over two years. Statutory damages under Section 1201 run from $200 to $2,500 for each act of circumvention. SerpApi reportedly earns a few million dollars in annual revenue, a mismatch Google uses to argue that damages alone cannot remedy the harm and that an injunction is required.

SerpApi was founded in 2017 in Austin, Texas, after founder Julien Khaleghy concluded that "scraping images from Google was an intensive process," according to both versions of the complaint. The company published a public responseto the original suit in January 2026 and moved to dismiss it on February 20, 2026.

Counsel for SerpApi commented on August 11, 2026, according to MediaPost: "We remain confident in the strength of SerpApi's position and look forward to responding."

Two courts, one defendant, opposite results

The refiling lands while SerpApi is losing ground in New York. In late July 2026, Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that Reddit can proceed with claims that SerpApi and Perplexity wrongly obtained copyrighted Reddit posts from Google search results, dismissing some claims while leaving the core anti-circumvention theory intact. SerpApi had asked that court to dismiss the amended complaint with prejudice in March 2026, arguing that Reddit cannot enforce copyrights its own user agreement leaves with its users.

The divergence is instructive. Reddit owns or holds licences directly from the users whose posts are at issue. Google licenses content from third parties and, until August 10, had not pleaded the terms under which it may defend that content. The two rulings turn on that difference rather than on any disagreement about what scraping is.

SerpApi is also litigating as plaintiff, pursuing a trade secret case against smaller rival SearchApi in the Western District of Texas, where the defendants moved to dismiss on April 20, 2026.

Why this matters for search measurement

The infrastructure question sitting under this case has not moved since July. SerpApi's output feeds rank trackers, competitive intelligence dashboards and keyword tools used across paid and organic search work. If an anti-bot layer over a public results page qualifies as a copyright access control, the legal exposure attached to reading a search results page changes for every vendor in that chain, not only for the named defendant.

The July order answered no for the general case, permanently. What remains alive is confined to results pages carrying a licensed image or other copyrighted item, and now depends on whether contractual language between Google and its licensors can supply the authority the statute requires.

Context matters for how narrow that channel is. Access to search data tightened sharply through 2025. Google eliminated the num=100 parameter on September 14, 2025, forcing tools to issue ten requests where one had sufficed. Semrush confirmed an industry-wide tenfold cost increase. Google restricted SerpApi's Light Fast API to three organic results in late September 2025 and blocked a DataForSEO workaround within five days of its announcement in October 2025. Litigation is the layer above those product decisions, not a substitute for them.

There is also an asymmetry PPC Land has documented before: the plaintiff here operates the largest crawling operation on the internet, and the amended complaint opens by describing that crawling as conducted "in accordance with permissions and instructions that websites convey," a line absent from the December version.

What happens next

SerpApi must respond to the amended complaint. The court's July order stayed discovery pending the filing of an amended complaint and the resolution of any motion to dismiss it, so that stay now runs against the August 10 filing. The order also imposed a constraint on the defence: "No new argument may be raised in a subsequent motion to dismiss that could have been raised in the first instance."

That limits SerpApi to the arguments it already made, plus whatever the new authorisation allegations open up. The court has already rejected the standing theory, the circumvention theory and the argument that Section 1201(a)(2) requires a sale. What is left to contest is whether contractual obligations to safeguard licensed content amount to authorisation from a copyright owner to deploy an access control, and whether a measure applied to an entire results page can be said to control access to the copyrighted fragments within it.

Timeline

  • 2017 - SerpApi is founded in Austin, Texas; versions of a Google licensing agreement with an unnamed major rights holder date from the same year
  • February 2024 - Reddit and Google enter a data licensing partnership covering Reddit and user content
  • January 2025 - Google launches SearchGuard, initially blocking SerpApi's access to search results
  • September 14, 2025 - Google eliminates the num=100 SERP parameter, multiplying request costs for measurement tools
  • Late September 2025 - Google restricts SerpApi's Light Fast API to three organic results
  • October 22, 2025 - Reddit sues SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI in the Southern District of New York
  • October 25, 2025 - Google blocks DataForSEO's cost-cutting workaround five days after it was announced
  • December 19, 2025 - Google files its original 13-page DMCA complaint against SerpApi
  • January 23, 2026 - SerpApi general counsel Chad Anson publishes a public response to the lawsuit
  • February 20, 2026 - SerpApi files its motion to dismiss
  • March 13, 2026 - SerpApi files a renewed motion to dismiss Reddit's amended complaint in New York
  • March 23, 2026 - SerpApi moves to stay discovery; the court vacates the case management conference set for March 30
  • April 6, 2026 - Google files its opposition to the motion to dismiss
  • April 20, 2026 - SearchApi moves to dismiss SerpApi's trade secret suit in Texas
  • May 6, 2026 - SerpApi files its reply brief
  • July 20, 2026 - Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers grants the motion to dismiss, giving Google 21 days to amend the Knowledge Panel claims
  • Late July 2026 - Judge Paul Engelmayer allows Reddit's claims against SerpApi and Perplexity to proceed in New York
  • August 10, 2026 - Google files its 15-page amended complaint, Docket No. 45, on the final day of the window
  • August 11, 2026 - Counsel for SerpApi says the company remains confident in its position

Summary

Who: Google LLC, represented by David H. Kramer of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, filed against SerpApi LLC, the Austin, Texas search-data provider founded in 2017 by Julien Khaleghy. Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers presides.

What: A 15-page amended complaint reasserting two DMCA claims under 17 U.S.C. Sections 1201(a)(1)(A) and 1201(a)(2). The new material alleges that copyright holders authorised and in some cases required Google to deploy access controls such as SearchGuard, citing a licensing agreement with Reddit, an unnamed partner holding copyrights to millions of works under an agreement dating to 2017, another content provider requiring download prevention, and Google's own Privacy Policy. References to Google Maps and Google Shopping were removed.

When: Filed August 10, 2026, the twenty-first and final day of the window set by the court's July 20, 2026 dismissal order. Counsel for SerpApi commented publicly on August 11, 2026.

Where: United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland Division, Case No. 4:25-cv-10826-YGR, Docket No. 45.

Why: The July order dismissed the broad claims permanently and left only a narrow path, conditioned on Google pleading facts showing SearchGuard operates with the authority of the copyright owner as Section 1201(a)(3)(B) requires. The amended complaint exists to supply those facts. Discovery remains stayed until any motion to dismiss the amended complaint is resolved.