Is It Legal to Scrape Google?

No. Google's rules on automated access to its services sit in three places:

1. Terms of Service. Google's Terms of Service forbid using automated means to access content from its services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on its pages, such as robots.txt files.
2. robots.txt. Google's own robots.txt disallows the /search path for all user agents, which covers the results pages.
3. Spam policies. Google's spam policies treat automated queries sent to Google without permission, including scraping results for rank-checking purposes, as machine-generated traffic.

None of these is a statute. They matter because they set up contract claims, because they mark where Google's technical defenses start, and because Google now enforces them in court.

Sources Google Terms of Service; Google spam policies.

On December 19, 2025, Google sued a company that sells Google search results through an API, in the Northern District of California (docket, No. 4:25-cv-10826). On July 20, 2026, Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted the defendant's motion to dismiss and set August 10 for an amended complaint; Google filed it that day, and the defendant moved to dismiss again. In September the court denied a motion to compel Google to produce licensing agreements. No ruling on the merits existed as of October 23, 2026.

Search data also appears in Reddit's October 2025 suit against Perplexity and three data companies over Reddit content collected from Google's results, pending in New York (docket, No. 1:25-cv-08736). Both cases are tracked in web scraping legal news.

Not as a crime, for public results collected while logged out. US courts read the federal anti-hacking law narrowly after Van Buren v. United States (2021): the question is whether you enter areas that are off limits to you. The civil risks are different:

• Contract. If you use Google while signed in to an account, you have accepted the Terms of Service.
• Anti-circumvention. 17 U.S.C. § 1201 forbids circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. Claims of this kind are now part of platform suits against scrapers.
• Copyright in what you copy. Titles and snippets come from publishers' pages; storing and republishing them in bulk is different from recording rank positions.

In Europe, search results are not personal data as such, but results for people's names are; the GDPR applies to them.

Sources Van Buren; 17 U.S.C. § 1201; GDPR.

SEO tools that check rankings are the most common reason to collect Google results, and they sit in the gray zone the spam policies describe: Google calls unpermitted automated queries machine-generated traffic. Recording your own and your competitors' positions for a set of keywords is lower risk than building a copy of Google's index, and it carries no personal data unless you track people's names. For the proxy side of rank tracking, see proxies for SEO and Google proxies.

The Google Maps Platform terms forbid scraping Google Maps content, and Google offers the Places API as the licensed route to place data. Scraping Maps listings breaks those terms; scraping reviews adds the reviewers' personal data and the copyright in their text. Business names, addresses and opening hours are facts; in Europe, a sole trader's name and phone number can still be personal data.

• Google Images. Google shows thumbnails of other sites' images. Each image belongs to its owner, so downloading for reuse needs that owner's license, not Google's.
• Google News. Headlines and snippets point to publishers' articles; copying full articles is copyright infringement whatever route you take.
• Google Trends. Trends publishes a relative interest index; the numbers are facts, but automated collection still breaks the Terms of Service. Cite Google Trends when you publish charts.
• Google Flights and Hotels. Fares and rates are facts that come from airlines and booking partners, whose own terms also apply.
• Google Scholar. Records point to publishers' and authors' work; large-scale collection breaks the Terms of Service, and the documents themselves are copyrighted.
• Google Play Store. App names, ratings and prices are facts; developer contact details can be personal data in Europe.

ProxyField's Google SERP API returns the Google results page as JSON, with the AI Overview, the People Also Ask block and the local pack parsed, for $1.20 per 1,000 successful results, falling to $0.80 at volume; you pay for successful results only. For your own collection, our residential proxies work with country, region and city targeting, and the pool is clean for Google, checked and segmented. Whether a project fits Google's terms is a question for your own legal review; the Google proxies page covers the technical setup.

• Google Terms of Service
• Google Search Central, spam policies
• Google Maps Platform terms
• Google Places API documentation
• Google v. a SERP data provider, N.D. Cal. No. 4:25-cv-10826, docket
• Reddit v. a data company and others, S.D.N.Y. No. 1:25-cv-08736, docket
• Van Buren v. United States (2021)
• 17 U.S.C. § 1201
• GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679
• Directive (EU) 2019/790
• CJEU C-30/14, Ryanair v PR Aviation

This is not legal advice. Laws, court decisions and Google's terms change, and the primary sources linked on this page are the authority.