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Google sues SerpAPI for selling its results despite Google Selling Publishers content
Posted by on December 20, 2025 at 5:11 pmThanks to u/goganghotra for sharing on X:
"well this can be said for Google too!"
Google deceptively takes content from publishers and sells it as Google AI Pro subscription which offers higher limits for Gemini & many others products which pull content from publishers without paying them anythin
Commenting on u/rustybrick's catch that Google are suing SerchAPI on X – linking to this Google blog:
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/serpapi-lawsuit/
A few key things
One: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are not search engines – despite the GEO myths running on the GEO subs created to platform misinformation
Two: LLMs dont have different trust criteria or need "clear structure" or influenced by Schema – they just get their results from Google
Will this force them to pay Google?
🤔
Will this give Google another Edge
🤔
Will LLMs build their "own" database
Obviously most GEO's think or want us to think that LLM fundamentally are search engins by default – even though their "memory" and training stores a tiny fraction of Googles vast www database – but they think pagerank could be replaced by just "assessing" content at face value – which could be possible or as people like me believe is just a logical fallacy "beging the question" – i..e the document making the claim can't be the evidence for the claim (Aristotle,
Aristotle's advice in S.E. 27 for resolving fallacies of Begging the Question is brief. If one realizes that one is being asked to concede the original point, one should refuse to do so, even if the point being asked is a reputable belief. Source: Wikipedia
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1 Reply
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>Two: LLMs dont have different trust criteria or need “clear structure” or influenced by Schema – they just get their results from Google
That’s not entirely true. Not every prompt results in a search. They do have a corpus of data they are trained on.
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I am completely ignorant when it comes to laws and legal matters, so my questions are more philosophical than anything else. I did read Google’s announcement from their head of legal, which is a bit more detailed, though.
1. What is the difference between someone searching for something on Google and then using the knowledge they acquired to sell it in any form, whether as data, a service, a course, or something else?
2. Who says Google follows strict guidelines and that websites listed on Google actually asked to be listed? Of course, most of us want to be there, but technically this is not true unless you explicitly request indexing, or at least set up GA4 or GSC. To say *”I don’t want”* (eg `robots.txt`) is nt the same as *”I want”*
3. What is the difference between this and other similar services like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and others? Have they not been doing essentially the same thing for decades?
4. *“SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others, such as images that appear in Knowledge Panels.”* This is a blatant lie, AFAIK we never licensed anything to Google in the first place.Again, I have no real understanding of the law, and I would not want to be in SerpApi’s position right now, but these are the questions that immediately come to mind.
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lolololol
Don’t be evil.
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