Our Response to Reddit, Inc. vs. SerpApi, LLC: Defending the First Amendment (serpapi.com)

SerpApi says it was served notice yesterday in Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi, LLC, et al., a lawsuit Reddit filed on October 22, 2025 that also names Perplexity and others. In a public response the company said the filing came as a surprise, that it will “vigorously defend” itself, and framed the dispute as a First Amendment issue — arguing it lawfully provides access to publicly available search data and that its business of delivering clean, unified, automated search results has powered developers, researchers, businesses and AI systems for eight years. The case matters to the AI/ML community because a court ruling could reshape legal boundaries around scraping, aggregation, and commercial distribution of search results — core inputs for many data pipelines and model-training workflows. SerpApi emphasizes technical details often at stake: structured, fast APIs that normalize heterogeneous search output from many engines into machine-readable formats used for SEO, monitoring, verification, and AI. If platforms can successfully restrict or litigate against third‑party aggregators, researchers and startups could lose access to curated search-derived datasets, forcing heavier reliance on platform APIs, paid data, or riskier collection methods. The lawsuit could therefore set precedent on whether assembling and redistributing publicly accessible web content is protected speech or actionable infringement for AI-driven services.