If you’ve ever tried to fetch Google results at scale, you hit a wall fast: blocks and CAPTCHAs. The reason is which IP your request comes from — and the fix is residential proxies.
Datacenter vs residential IPs
- Datacenter IPs belong to cloud/hosting providers. They’re cheap and fast — and search engines recognise and block them quickly because real users don’t browse from server farms.
- Residential IPs are assigned by ISPs to real homes and phones. Traffic through them looks like an ordinary consumer, so it’s trusted and rarely blocked.
A residential proxy routes your request through one of those real consumer IPs.
Why SERP APIs depend on them
To return the real google.com results, a SERP API must fetch the live page without being blocked. Residential proxies make that possible:
your request → SERP API → residential proxy (real ISP IP) → google.com → resultsThis is a big part of what you’re paying for. Running your own residential proxy pool is expensive and complex — see why scraping Google yourself is hard.
You don’t manage any of this
The value of a SERP API is that the proxy layer is invisible. With serp.cheap, you send a query and get JSON back — the residential proxying, retries and parsing happen on their side, for ~$0.0006 per request.
Next
Try serp.cheap
Skip running your own proxy pool — serp.cheap handles the residential proxying and returns Google results as JSON. 100 free searches on signup — no card required; pay-as-you-go from $0.75/1k after that, and credits stay valid for 12 months.
- Get your free API key →
- Prefer paying by card? serp.cheap is also on RapidAPI (
$0.90/1k) and Apify ($1.50/1k).