Reddit Sues Perplexity AI and Scraping Vendors Over 'Data Laundering'

On October 22, 2025, Reddit filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Perplexity AI and three data-scraping intermediaries: Oxylabs (Lithuania), AWMProxy (described in the complaint as a former Russian botnet), and SerpApi (Texas). Reddit's central legal theory rested on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, accompanied by claims for unjust enrichment and unfair competition.

Reddit alleged that after AI firms were blocked from accessing Reddit directly, they obtained its content indirectly by harvesting Google's indexed search results at massive scale, a practice it called 'data laundering.' Reddit subpoenaed Google, which confirmed it relies on an access control system called 'SearchGuard' to keep automated systems from obtaining wholesale search results. Reddit alleged the defendants disguised their scrapers as regular people and, during a two-week span in July, scraped almost three billion Google search-result pages containing Reddit text, URLs, images, and videos. Likening the defendants to bank robbers, Reddit described a honeypot test — content planted as 'the digital equivalent of marked bills' that could be found only in Google search results — and said that within hours, queries to Perplexity's answer engine produced the contents of that test post. After Reddit sent a cease-and-desist letter, it alleged, Perplexity's citations to Reddit content increased forty-fold.

Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee called Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi 'textbook examples' of scrapers that bypass technological protections to steal data, and said Perplexity was 'a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers.' Reddit framed the suit as protecting its paid licensing partnerships with OpenAI and Google and user privacy, and sought an injunction barring the companies from scraping Reddit content out of Google results or selling Reddit data.

The defendants pushed back publicly. Posting its response on Reddit itself, Perplexity denied wrongdoing, said its answer engine summarizes and cites Reddit discussions, that as an application-layer company it does not train AI models on content, and called the suit a 'show of force in Reddit's training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI,' writing, 'We won't be extorted.' SerpApi said Reddit never notified it before filing and vowed to defend itself in court, while Oxylabs said it was 'shocked and disappointed' and argued that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to it.

The case quickly shaped the wider scraping-law landscape. Google, emboldened by Reddit's legal theory, filed its own DMCA suit against SerpApi in December 2025, citing Reddit's case. On July 20, 2026, a court granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss Google's case, finding Google had no DMCA standing because it did not own the content in its search results — a ruling DMCA specialist Meredith Rose of the nonprofit Public Knowledge said did not bode well for Reddit, whose own case faced a SerpApi motion-to-dismiss hearing the same week, with the judge focused on whether Reddit's agreement with Google actually authorized Google to protect its copyrighted content.