Reddit lawsuit against SerpApi survives dismissal motion

A federal judge handed Reddit a meaningful legal win on July 31, 2026, largely denying a motion to dismiss from web scraping service SerpApi. The ruling means Reddit’s core claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act move forward. What the court actually decided US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, sitting in the Southern District of New York, ruled that Reddit had plausibly pleaded a conspiracy between SerpApi and Perplexity AI. The alleged arrangement: SerpApi provided a product capable of circumventing Google’s access controls, and Perplexity AI paid for it. Reddit argues that instead of scraping Reddit directly, Perplexity routed its data collection through Google search results, using SerpApi as the technical middleman. The effect, Reddit claims, was industrial-scale harvesting of hundreds of billions of search results containing user posts and comments for AI training, without a licensing agreement or a dollar changing hands to Reddit. The lawsuit was originally filed on October 22, 2025. Beyond SerpApi and Perplexity AI, Reddit’s complaint names Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy as additional defendants. Reddit says the unauthorized activity cost it real money, specifically in...