Reddit Is Suing SerpApi Too. Here's How That Case Differs From Google's.

Disclaimer: We build a data API, we're not lawyers. This is a plain-language read of two active lawsuits, not legal advice. For your own situation, talk to an attorney.

A few days ago a federal judge in California dismissed Google's DMCA case against SerpApi, and a lot of people read it as "scraping search results is settled now." It isn't. Because SerpApi is fighting a second, older, and in some ways messier lawsuit over the exact same activity, this one brought by Reddit, in a different court, on a partly different theory.

If you only saw the Google headline, you're missing half the story. So here's the Reddit case, what makes it different, and why the two could land in genuinely different places.

How the Reddit case started

On October 22, 2025, Reddit filed suit in the Southern District of New York, naming four defendants: the AI search company Perplexity, the Lithuanian proxy provider Oxylabs, a domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a former botnet, and SerpApi. The through-line Reddit alleges is a "data laundering" chain: scrapers pull Reddit content out of Google search results, and an AI company buys that data rather than licensing it from Reddit directly.

The detail everyone remembers is the trap. Reddit says it planted a post engineered to be visible only to Google's crawler, then watched that same planted content surface in a Perplexity answer, which it offered as proof the content had traveled through the scraping-to-AI pipeline (The Register, PBS NewsHour).

Like the Google suit, Reddit's core legal hook is DMCA Section 1201, the anti-circumvention rule. The claim is that the defendants bypassed technological protections guarding Reddit content, including protections on Google's results pages, to harvest it at scale.

Why this isn't just a copy of the Google case

Here's where it gets interesting, and why you can't assume the Google dismissal automatically sinks the Reddit one.

Different court. Google's case was in the Northern District of California; Reddit's is in the Southern District of New York. A dismissal in one district isn't binding on the other. A New York judge can look at California's reasoning and simply disagree.

A standing problem that's unique to Reddit. This is the big one. In the Google case, Google was defending its own search product. Reddit has a harder ownership story. SerpApi's motion to dismiss leans hard on it: Reddit's own user agreement says users retain ownership of their posts, and Reddit holds only a non-exclusive license to that content. If Reddit doesn't own the copyrights, SerpApi argues, it can't bring DMCA claims over user posts in the first place. That's an argument that simply didn't exist against Google.

The "it's just public search results" defense. SerpApi's position is that it accessed Google Search pages, not Reddit's servers, and retrieved the same results any person typing a query into Google would see. It says it doesn't break encryption or bypass any login, and that reading a public webpage isn't "circumvention" under the DMCA. It even points out that Reddit's own privacy policy tells users their public posts may show up in search engines.

What's actually copyrightable. SerpApi argues the specific things Reddit pointed to, short fragments, dates, addresses, aren't protected by copyright to begin with. That echoes the reasoning that killed the plain-results portion of the Google case: facts and short snippets aren't "works protected under the Copyright Act."

Where the two cases rhyme

For all the differences, the same fault line runs through both: can a platform use copyright's anti-circumvention rules to control access to publicly visible information it doesn't necessarily own?

The Google ruling answered "not for plain, uncopyrighted results, and not without the copyright owner's authorization." That logic is helpful to SerpApi in the Reddit case too, because a big chunk of what Reddit is complaining about is exactly that: publicly visible posts, surfaced through public search results, much of it owned by users rather than Reddit. If a court follows the California reasoning, Reddit's ownership gap becomes a real problem.

But, and this matters, the Google court also said deceptive evasion of a genuine access control could violate the DMCA in the right circumstances. Reddit's complaint is built around alleged evasion of technological guardrails and a vivid "trap post" narrative. If any defendant is shown to have used deceptive means to get around a real access control on copyrighted material, that's the fact pattern the statute was actually written for.

The part that's bigger than either company

Strip away the specific parties and this is really a fight about who gets to touch public web data in the AI era. Reddit signed a reported content-licensing deal with Google and has been aggressive about monetizing its archive as training data. The scrapers and AI companies argue that no one owns public facts and that walling them off breaks the open web. That tension, licensing revenue versus open access, is the actual engine behind both lawsuits.

For anyone building on public data, the practical read is the same one we've made before: the line between public and private data still governs almost everything, and the safest ground is public, unauthenticated, factual data, not login-gated content and not wholesale copies of original creative work. We walked through the full case history, hiQ, Van Buren, Meta v. Bright Data, in our web scraping legality guide if you want the deeper background.

The honest limits (don't over-read this)

• Both cases are unresolved as to Reddit. The Google claims were dismissed; the Reddit case is still live, with the court weighing SerpApi's motion to dismiss the amended complaint. Nothing here is a final ruling on the merits.
• A motion to dismiss tests the complaint, not the truth. Even a win for SerpApi at this stage is about whether Reddit pleaded a valid claim, not a factual finding that no circumvention happened.
• DMCA is only one theory. These suits don't decide breach-of-contract/terms-of-service claims, and platforms can still pursue those separately. Violating a site's ToS is a different (and real) risk from a DMCA violation.
• Ownership cuts differently per platform. Reddit's non-exclusive-license problem is specific to how its user agreement is written. Another platform with different terms could be on stronger footing.
• This is US law. The EU, UK, and other jurisdictions analyze scraping through different frameworks entirely.

What it means for how we operate

None of this changes how SociaVault works. We collect publicly available data only, we don't log in or bypass authentication, and we don't try to repackage copyrighted media as if it were free. Our customers are the data controllers responsible for how they use what they pull, which is spelled out in our compliance statement. Cases like these don't move our line; they just keep testing where the industry's line sits.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Reddit v. SerpApi case over?

No. Unlike the Google case, which was dismissed on July 20, 2026, Reddit's lawsuit is still active. The court is weighing SerpApi's motion to dismiss Reddit's amended complaint. Until there's a ruling, it's ongoing.

How is Reddit's case different from Google's?

It's in a different court (Southern District of New York vs. Northern District of California), and it has an ownership wrinkle Google didn't: Reddit's user agreement says users keep ownership of their posts, so SerpApi argues Reddit only holds a non-exclusive license and can't bring DMCA copyright claims over that content.

What is the "trap post" Reddit talks about?

Reddit says it planted content designed to be visible only to Google's crawler, then found that same content in a Perplexity AI answer, which it uses as evidence that scraped Reddit data flowed through search results into an AI product.

Does the Google dismissal help SerpApi against Reddit?

Potentially, since both turn on whether copyright's anti-circumvention rules can wall off public, largely uncopyrighted data. But it's persuasive, not binding, and Reddit's case raises separate questions about ownership and alleged deceptive circumvention.

Why are AI companies part of a scraping lawsuit?

Because the real fight is over AI training data. Reddit frames it as "data laundering," scrapers harvest public content and AI firms buy it instead of licensing it. Perplexity is named as the AI company alleged to have used the scraped data.

Does this mean scraping Reddit is illegal?

No court has ruled that. The case is testing the theory, not confirming it. As always, public factual data sits on very different legal ground than login-gated content or copying original creative work wholesale, and terms-of-service obligations are a separate consideration.

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If you'd rather build on clean, structured public data than watch scraping lawsuits to figure out what's safe, that's the whole idea behind SociaVault. Start free with 50 credits, no card required, across 25+ social platforms.

Sources: Search Engine Land, The Register, PBS NewsHour, and PPC Land. Content was rephrased and summarized for compliance with licensing restrictions.