Reddit alleges perplexity and serpapi bypassed googles searchguard to pull nearly three billion…
reddit alleges perplexity and serpapi bypassed googles searchguard to pull nearly three billion search result pages containing reddit content in a two week span, then sued under the dmcas anti-circumvention clause rather than plain copyright. the complaint also describes a test post visible only to google crawlers showing up in perplexity outputs within hours.
scraping the scrapers is now a federal case, and the robots.txt era is officially over.
Context
Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi LLC et al., 1:25-cv-08736 (SDNY), was filed on 22 October 2025. In the complaint, Reddit alleges that during two weeks in July 2025 the defendants SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy circumvented Google's SearchGuard and accessed almost three billion search result pages containing Reddit content. Separately, Reddit alleges Perplexity was caught by a test post crawlable only by Google, whose contents appeared in Perplexity's answer engine within hours. Reuters of 31 July 2026 reports the judge rejected most of Perplexity's bid to dismiss, advancing claims that it unlawfully scraped Reddit data and a conspiracy claim.
These are allegations by Reddit, not findings. A ruling on a motion to dismiss is not a decision on the merits. The complaint ties the almost three billion pages to SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy and the test post to Perplexity separately; the note joins Perplexity and SerpApi to the three billion and leaves out Oxylabs and AWMProxy. The complaint is dated October 2025, about eleven months before the note. Oxylabs' statement defending access to public information appears in Reuters; no Perplexity or SerpApi statement was read. The lines on scraping the scrapers and the end of the robots.txt era are the author's opinion.
Watch next
- The court's later rulings and defendants' responses.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 22:46 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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