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Google scraping is all the rage these days. But if you try to monitor Google rankings or track keywords too often without a Google proxy network, it will quickly hit you with a CATPCHA or even block your IP.
Since scraping Google is so valuable, we tested proxy providers to see how good they are when targeting Google’s servers. We ran automated tests with thousands of connection requests to measure the performance of major proxy services.
Need to scrape more than just Google? Check out the Best Web Scraping Proxies list. Or you can check the SERP API services that will handle proxies and web scraping challenges for you.
To test the proxy performance when targeting Google, we used a Splash script with both proxies and test server located in the US. We ran three tests with a total of 5,400 requests at 1 request per second. Results were validated via their response code (200), HTML size, and page title.
Here are the results for our top Google proxy providers:
| Provider | Success rate for Google | Response time for Google |
| Decodo | 87.33% | 4.34 s |
| Oxylabs | 93.28% | 3.82 s |
| Infatica | 94.43% | 5.52 s |
| NetNut | 90.96% | 5.01 s |
| SOAX | 81.50% | 3.46 s |
| Webshare | 88.35% | 5.38 s |
| DataImpulse | 81.41% | 3.94 s |
Decodo is, whatever the situation, probably the most balanced choice in the proxy sphere. And in terms of Google proxies, it brings 115 million IPs from around the globe, with prices starting at a very respectable $3.50/GB. What’s more, you can set rotation to occur with every request or every minute, but you may also go as far out as 24 hours. Great customer support, too.
Oxylabs is the go-to choice for enterprise users. The Google connection stats are good – and then you hit the 175 million IP pool spread across the globe. You can make full use of that too, with filtering down to coordinates and ZIP code.
Infatica’s success rate on Google was one of the best. And while it has servers all around the globe, they only include some 15 million IPs. Still too many rotate through all of them manually – yes, that’s one of the options. But with a $4/GB price tag, you’d expect more out of their network (or user experience).
With its high entry price at $99, NetNut is a good choice for large businesses. 85 million residential IPs is a decent-enough pool size for most purposes. The filtering options allow you to go town to city, and it’s possible to create sessions lasting up to an hour.
SOAX’s proxies offer probably some of the best response times in the US and a respectably large proxy pool. An added bonus are extra filtering options like optimizing for IP uniqueness. And at $4/GB, the starting price is basically industry-standard.
Webshare has a decent proxy pool of 80 million residential IPs, priced very reasonably at $3.50/GB. You can configure them comprehensively – the level of self-service is unparalleled in the industry. On the other hand, you can’t go beyond country-level targeting.
Dataimpulse is an odd duck: <4 second response time (that’s good), ~81% success rate (that’s bad). However, at $50 ($1/GB), the rates are very attractive, so it’s an offer few can ignore. Especially when the 90 million IP pool covers over 100 locations with filtering down to the ZIP code.
Scraping Google Search results is a real technical challenge. The search giants are very good at detecting and blocking scrapers, so successful Google scrapes often depend on the quality of your scraping software.
Since we’re a proxy review site and not real hard-core scrapers, we chose the easy way to objectively test proxies: we just sent a huge number of concurrent connection requests to Google and counted the response codes we got.
We also measured the speed of those connections, but this was secondary to success rate; what good is your ultra-speedy proxy when you are experiencing death by ReCaptcha? The top 7 providers in our list rank by their network scalability, speed and features they offer.
While we’re talking CAPTCHAs – proxy network quality is in part determined by how many of them you see, so we counted CAPTCHA response rates as failed connections. That means top Google proxies in our list are also the ones that have the absolute lowest abuse rate.
Scraping Google Maps for GMB and other SEO data is not that much different. You will still need residential proxies, because datacenter IP addresses are too easy to block via subnetwork bans. Another vital criterion for proxies is that they should not have been abused on Google and have good scalability. This is why our top Google proxy list also applies to scraping Google Maps.
Scraping local Google results is a bit trickier. You can use Google’s settings to set a location, but to really extract data as it appears for localized searches, you need to have local IP addresses.
This is why scraping Google for local results requires a proxy network with location targeting. For instance, some of the top providers in this list, like Decodo and SOAX, enable backconnect with access to IP addresses in close to 200 countries.
A Google proxy is a proxy IP address that lets you access various Google services. Proxies are used to see how content is displayed in different locations and to avoid IP blocks when scraping Google Search.
Yes. Proxies are perfect for changing your location, so that you can see and scrape local results from Google. In fact, it’s one of their primary use cases.
If you know what you’re doing, datacenter proxies will suffice. But if you need proxies for local results or high-volume scraping, you’ll be better off with residential proxies instead.
Sure, there’s plenty of proxy lists online. But those IPs will be a hassle more than an asset. We strongly suggest investing in paid proxies. If you’re on the fence, most providers offer money-back guarantees. Go try one.