Reddit’s scraping suit clears an early hurdle over Google’s anti-bot controls

SerpApi’s position is that it accesses public search results rather than Reddit’s platform. Its lawyer, Jeff Homrig of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, said in a statement reported after the decision that public information does not become protected merely because a platform seeks to charge for it. Perplexity has denied the allegations; a company spokesperson said it would defend the open internet.

Why Reddit’s theory survived where Google’s did not

Google’s role is the important distinction. Reddit licenses content to Google, OpenAI and other companies for AI training. In this case, Reddit alleged that the Google license specifically restricts certain uses of its data and gives Google authority to deploy protections against unauthorized access to the licensed material.

Engelmayer treated that allegation as more specific than Google’s own earlier case against SerpApi, which a separate court dismissed at an early stage after finding Google had not shown that copyright holders authorized it to enforce the relevant rights. The court analysis described in the reporting also accepted, for now, that licensing agreements need not be rewritten whenever a partner introduces a new security measure.

That does not settle the authorization question. The opinion left room for SerpApi and Perplexity to show in discovery that Reddit never authorized Google to protect its content in search results. It also flagged a separate defense: that publicly accessible results may not contain works protected by the Copyright Act.

The commercial dispute behind the legal theory

Reddit’s account connects the litigation to both licensing revenue and user deletions. It alleges that the scraping businesses pulled data from billions of Google results without permission. It also says licensees must delete posts that Reddit flags after users remove them, and that millions of posts are deleted each month; on Reddit’s theory, copies retained in an answer engine could frustrate that commitment and reduce the value of paid access.

Those are Reddit’s allegations, not findings. But they explain why the company is pursuing a theory built around a search partner’s controls rather than simply claiming that a public page was read. A merits victory could make it easier for a platform with a comparable license and authorization to police collection of content exposed in search results; it would not create a general right to charge for public information.

The defendants did win dismissal of Reddit’s unjust-enrichment and unfair-competition claims as preempted by the Copyright Act. Reddit still seeks unspecified monetary damages and an order blocking Perplexity from using its data, according to the case report.

The order’s conclusion states the Court’s disposition of the motions to dismiss. Source: cdn.arstechnica.net.

What discovery must establish

The next decision point is factual, not rhetorical. The parties will need evidence on the scope of Reddit’s Google license, the operation of Google’s protections, what appeared in the allegedly accessed results, and how each defendant obtained or used the material.

Those facts will determine whether this is a case about unauthorized circumvention of protected works or, as SerpApi argues, automated access to public search results. The dismissal ruling preserves both possibilities; it decides neither.