Reddit v. Perplexity & the Scrapers: If the Front Door Is Locked, Scrape Google
The old internet was wonderfully simple.
A website published a page.
Google indexed it.
People found it.
Everybody was happy.
Then AI arrived.
Now the website blocks the AI crawler.
Google still indexes the website.
A scraping company allegedly scrapes Google.
An AI company allegedly obtains the scraped material.
And everybody hires lawyers.
Welcome to Reddit v. Perplexity.
Reddit sued AI search company Perplexity and three data-scraping businesses — SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy — accusing them of participating in an industrial system for obtaining Reddit content despite the platform’s attempts to restrict automated access.
The lawsuit was filed in October 2025.
By July 2026, Perplexity had already tried to get it thrown out.
It largely failed.
The case continues.
And it may become one of the strangest tests yet of what “publicly available information” actually means in an internet increasingly populated by machines.
Reddit Locked the Door
Reddit has become extremely valuable to AI companies for an obvious reason.
Humans wrote it.
Millions of humans.
For years.
Questions.
Answers.
Arguments.
Reviews.
Recommendations.
Technical explanations.
Personal experiences.
And vast quantities of extremely strange material that no corporate training-data department could manufacture if it tried.
For large language models and AI answer engines, this is gold.
Reddit knows it.
That is why Reddit has signed licensing agreements with companies including Google and OpenAI.
Pay Reddit and you can obtain access under negotiated terms.
But Reddit says Perplexity had no such license.
Instead, according to the lawsuit, Reddit content continued finding its way into Perplexity’s answer engine.
So Reddit began asking the obvious question:
How?
Follow the Data
Reddit had already restricted automated access to its platform.
Its complaint alleges that scraping companies nevertheless obtained Reddit material indirectly — including through search-engine results.
Think about how wonderfully absurd that pipeline is:
Reddit user → Reddit → Google → scraper → Perplexity → AI answer.
At every stage, somebody adds infrastructure.
At every stage, somebody extracts value.
And at the beginning of the chain sits somebody named DragonFarts1987 who wrote the original comment for free.
This is the modern information economy.
Scrape the Search Engine That Scraped the Web
Search engines have crawled websites for decades.
That was tolerated because the bargain was obvious.
Google copies and indexes portions of your site.
Google sends visitors back.
The website receives traffic.
Google receives a search engine.
AI answer systems disrupt that bargain.
They can use information extracted from search results to answer the user directly.
The user may never visit the original site.
So the economic chain changes.
A search engine crawls Reddit.
A scraper harvests search results.
An AI company obtains the scraped information.
The AI answers the question.
Reddit supplied the underlying content.
Reddit may receive neither traffic nor money.
Unsurprisingly, Reddit finds this arrangement less charming.
Reddit Says It Set a Trap
Then the story becomes genuinely entertaining.
According to Reddit, it created a test post designed to help determine whether its content was being extracted indirectly.
The post was made available for Google to crawl but was otherwise inaccessible.
Reddit says the contents soon appeared in Perplexity.
If Reddit can prove the allegation and establish the route by which the information traveled, that becomes a remarkably vivid piece of evidence.
Because the question changes from:
“Maybe Perplexity got this information somewhere else.”
to:
“How exactly did this thing that only Google could see end up over there?”
That is not merely litigation.
That is bait.
The Data Laundromat
Reddit has used a particularly effective phrase for what it says is happening:
data laundering.
The concept is simple.
Suppose Company A cannot lawfully or contractually obtain data directly from Website X.
Company B scrapes the data.
Company A buys the result from Company B.
Has the origin problem disappeared?
The bytes are the same.
Only the supplier changed.
This is where AI supply chains become legally dangerous.
AI developers increasingly rely on outside vendors for datasets, search results, crawling infrastructure and real-time web access.
That creates distance between the AI company and the original collection.
Distance can be operationally useful.
Legally, it may not be disinfectant.
Perplexity Says the Internet Should Stay Open
Perplexity disputes Reddit’s allegations.
Its broader position is familiar and powerful:
Public information should remain accessible.
The open web should not become a collection of privately controlled data silos where every act of automated reading requires a licensing agreement.
There is a real policy argument here.
If every website can block automated access and then charge anyone who wants to computationally analyze public pages, the architecture of the web changes dramatically.
The public web becomes public only for humans.
Machines need tickets.
That may benefit large platforms capable of selling licenses.
It may be considerably less attractive for researchers, startups, archives and new search technologies.
So this is not simply:
Reddit good.
Scraper bad.
The underlying question is much harder.
What does “public” mean when the reader is software?
Google Is Now the Side Door
The involvement of Google makes the case particularly strange.
A website may try to block AI crawlers while continuing to allow Googlebot.
Why?
Because disappearing from Google Search can destroy traffic.
That creates an obvious weak point.
If Google is allowed inside, somebody may attempt to extract the site's information from Google instead.
The website has locked its front door while leaving a commercial loading dock open because its business depends on the trucks.
The scrapers allegedly discovered the loading dock.
That makes traditional bot blocking considerably less useful.
You can stop the AI company from crawling you.
But can you stop it from obtaining information from somebody who crawled somebody who crawled you?
Welcome to data provenance in 2026.
And Then Google Sued a Scraper Too
The irony became even better.
In December 2025, Google itself sued SerpApi, one of the scraping companies also named in Reddit’s lawsuit.
Google accused SerpApi of using enormous numbers of automated searches and circumventing anti-scraping measures to extract and resell Google search results.
So the chain begins eating itself.
Websites complain that Google copies them.
AI companies obtain information from search engines.
Scrapers copy the search engines.
Google sues the scrapers.
Reddit sues the scrapers and the AI company.
Everybody believes in the open internet until somebody else starts copying their database.
Copyright Is Only Part of the Weaponry
Like Reddit’s fight with Anthropic, this dispute is interesting because copyright is not the only legal weapon available.
Modern scraping cases can involve a cocktail of theories:
copyright,
contract,
circumvention,
unfair competition,
access restrictions,
and other claims depending on the facts and jurisdiction.
That matters because AI companies may eventually win important arguments about training copyrighted material.
But that does not necessarily answer whether they were entitled to obtain the material in the particular way alleged.
There are two separate questions:
Can you legally use this data?
and
Were you legally entitled to get it this way?
AI companies would very much prefer those questions to merge.
Courts may not cooperate.
Perplexity Tried to Kill the Case
By July 2026, Perplexity had asked the federal court in Manhattan to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer largely refused.
The court allowed core parts of Reddit’s case to proceed, including important claims involving alleged circumvention and copyright infringement, while dismissing some secondary claims.
That is not a finding that Perplexity did what Reddit alleges.
Reddit still has to prove its case.
Perplexity can defend itself.
Other defendants have their own arguments.
But the lawsuit survived a major early attack.
So the discovery machinery can keep moving.
And discovery is where data pipelines become interesting.
Who collected what?
From where?
Using which IP addresses?
Through which service?
Under which contract?
Who paid whom?
What did the buyer know?
Logs have an unfortunate habit of turning philosophy into timestamps.
The Internet Is Becoming a Chain of Custody
For twenty years, web information mostly had a URL.
Now it increasingly has provenance.
Where did this answer come from?
Which crawler collected the source?
Was crawling permitted?
Was the data licensed?
Was it purchased from a broker?
Did the broker obtain it directly?
Through Google?
Through an archive?
Through somebody else’s API?
Was the original source blocked?
Did somebody circumvent that block?
The AI industry needs enormous quantities of information.
That means data provenance may eventually become as important as the models themselves.
A dataset without a clean history can become a litigation bomb.
Everybody Wants the Open Web — Until the Invoice Arrives
There is something almost beautiful about these scraping wars.
Reddit believes public discussion should be accessible.
But not necessarily to AI companies for free.
Perplexity believes public information should remain open.
Especially information its product needs.
Google believes in indexing the open web.
But it sued a company it says scraped Google’s own results at enormous scale.
The philosophical positions become remarkably flexible depending on which direction the data is moving.
My crawler is indexing.
Your crawler is stealing.
That may be the unofficial constitution of the modern internet.
The Front Door Is No Longer the Point
Reddit v. Perplexity is ultimately about something larger than Reddit.
Blocking one crawler may no longer protect anything.
Information can travel through search engines.
Caches.
Archives.
Data brokers.
Scraping services.
APIs.
Third-party datasets.
And other AI systems.
The modern web is not a straight pipe.
It is plumbing installed by lunatics.
Close one valve and the data may arrive through another building.
That leaves courts with a wonderfully unpleasant question.
If a company knows the front door is locked, and instead buys the contents from somebody who climbed through a side window, what exactly has the company bought?
Public information?
Scraped data?
Stolen value?
Or merely the internet doing what the internet has always done?
Reddit thinks it knows the answer.
Perplexity disagrees.
Now the logs, contracts and crawlers get their turn.
Because in the AI data wars, the question is no longer merely:
What did you scrape?
It is:
Who scraped it for you?
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