SERP API vs Proxy-Based Web Scraping: A Developer’s Buyer Guide

Whether you’re building SEO tools, analytics dashboards, or search-driven apps, collecting search engine results is often a core requirement. But how you fetch that data matters , not just for reliability, but also for performance, maintenance, and long-term scalability. In this post, we’ll break down two popular approaches for gathering search engine data: Using a SERP API your own proxy-based web scraper By the end, you’ll understand the pros, cons, trade-offs, and when to choose each. If you want even more detail, check out the full buyer’s guide here: 👉 https://blog.apilayer.com/serp-api-vs-proxy-based-web-scraping-buyers-guide/ What Developers Really Need from Search Data When building products that use search engine results, you usually care about: Accuracy , Is the data correct and up-to-date? Speed , Can I fetch data quickly? Reliability , Will my system break when Google changes its markup? Scalability , Can I scale requests to hundreds or thousands a day? Maintenance , How mu