Full definition
SERP scraping means extracting Google's (or any search engine's) result pages programmatically: top 10 organic results, ads, people-also-ask boxes, knowledge panels, local pack. Used by SEO agencies to track client rankings, by brand-protection teams to monitor counterfeits, and by AI companies to ground LLM responses.
Google is the hardest target on the public internet. The standard rate limit is "infinity until you're blocked, then forever after." Bypassing requires high-trust residential proxies, geographic targeting (different countries see different results), realistic browser fingerprints, and ideally a managed SERP API.
Top picks: Bright Data SERP API ($1.50–$3 per 1,000 queries), Oxylabs SERP Scraper API, Smartproxy SERP Scraping API, ScraperAPI Google. All return parsed JSON instead of raw HTML, which saves you from re-implementing Google's parser every quarter when they redesign.