Proxy & Scraping Search Demand Report

Home › Guides › Proxy & Scraping Search Demand Report

✓ data: Google Ads keyword-volume estimates (October 2022–August 2026) and, separately, Google Trends (January 2022–September 2026), both retrieved through the DataForSEO API on 2 October 2026 · method · caveats · download the data

What are people searching for when they look for proxies and scraping tools, and how has that changed? We pulled Google’s estimated monthly search volumes for 87 proxy and scraping keywords, for the US, worldwide and 23 other countries. The keywords cover generic terms, proxy and scraping-tool brands, AI-scraping terms and anti-bot terms. We compare the latest 12 months (September 2025–August 2026) with the first 12 months Google makes available (October 2022–September 2023). A script recomputes every number on this page from the saved API responses.

Read this first. These are modeled estimates, not counts. Google Ads rounds volumes into broad buckets and merges near-identical keywords, and the figures can be revised. Use them for direction and relative size, not as exact traffic. Searches are a sign of interest. They don’t show purchases, market share or revenue.

US searches, tracked terms, latest 12 months 332,829/mochange vs 2022–23 +67%US AI-scraping terms 1,243 → 35,878/moUS share of worldwide 9.6%

Headline numbers

1. Demand for proxy and scraping terms is up by about two-thirds. The 76 terms we count averaged 332,829 US searches a month in September 2025–August 2026. In October 2022–September 2023 the figure was 199,304 (+67%). Worldwide it rose from 2,161,319 to 3,457,773 (+60%).
2. AI-scraping searches went from almost nothing to a major category. US searches for our AI-scraping terms rose from 1,243 a month to 35,878. Most of that is one tool. Firecrawl went from 72 US searches a month to 23,575, and 123,250 worldwide. It is now the second most-searched scraping-tool brand we track, after Apify. Browserbase (7,117) and Crawl4AI (3,325) barely registered in 2022–23.
3. Proxy-brand searches roughly doubled in the US, and the field got more crowded. US searches for the proxy brands we track changed by +96%. Bright Data (including its old name, Luminati) is still the most-searched brand in the US, but its share of brand searches fell from 33.2% to 20.5%. IPRoyal (18.2%) and Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) (16.4%) come next. Searches for “oxylabs” changed by +333%.
4. Worldwide, two brands with free tiers lead. Webshare has 30.7% of worldwide proxy-brand searches and ProxyScrape 22.9%. Bright Data has 8.1%.
5. Two proxy types and Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA lead the risers. Among terms with at least 100 US searches a month in 2022–23, the biggest US risers are “datacenter proxy” (+813%), “isp proxy” (+621%) and “cloudflare turnstile” (+575%), Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA alternative. “Residential proxy” changed by +152%, to 11,683 a month.
6. Tutorial-style and older-tool searches are falling. The biggest US fallers are “python web scraping” (−63%), “parsehub” (−60%), “2captcha” (−58%) and “gptbot” (−58%). “Beautifulsoup” (−52%) and “web scraping” itself (−23%) are down too. Searches for “gptbot” spiked when OpenAI announced its crawler in August 2023 (5,400 in the US that month) and have since dropped back.
7. Anti-bot searches are mixed. US searches for our anti-bot terms changed by +14%, led by “cloudflare turnstile” (+575%). Worldwide the group is down (−54%), mostly because “2captcha” dropped from 489,750 to 156,000 searches a month. “Bypass cloudflare” is small and flat: 191 US searches a month, against 200 in 2022–23.
8. India and Indonesia out-search the US, thanks to “proxy server”. India (713,567 a month) and Indonesia (628,820) top the country list, ahead of the US (332,829). Most of their volume is consumer-style searches for “proxy server”, “free proxy” and “proxy list”. Leave those three terms out and the United States leads (263,088), then India (244,059) and Indonesia (211,370).

US search demand by keyword group

Fastest risers and fallers

US, terms with at least 100 searches a month in October 2022–September 2023. Average monthly searches.

New since 2022–23: terms with fewer than 100 US searches a month then and at least 1,000 now.

Worldwide risers and fallers are in the keyword CSV. The worldwide list differs: “decodo” tops it (+16,355%), and “proxy server” changed by +411% worldwide but only +2% in the US.

How demand splits between brands

Proxy brands: average monthly searches (share of all proxy-brand searches in that column).

Scraping and AI-scraping tools

Brand searches include people who are already customers, such as people looking for a login page, so they measure attention, not new demand. Proxy-Cheap and SerpApi are left out of the brand tables because Google Ads returns the same numbers for “proxy cheap” as for “cheap proxy”, and for “serpapi” as for “serp api”. Geonode is left out because the name is shared with an open-source GIS platform.

Which countries search most

Keywords are in English. Countries where people mostly search in other languages are undercounted, except for brand names, which are the same in every language. The US accounts for 9.6% of worldwide searches for these terms.

The long view: Google Trends since January 2022

Google Ads only goes back to October 2022, so we also pulled Google Trends from January 2022. Trends gives a relative index, not search counts: 100 is the peak week for the most-searched term in each comparison group of five. Values can only be compared within a group.

Yearly averages of weekly index values (0–100) within each comparison group. – means Google Trends returned no value. Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends).

Where the two sources disagree. Trends agrees with Google Ads on the big moves: Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, Oxylabs and “residential proxy” all rise in both. But it shows “web scraping” and “data scraping” rising, while Ads volumes for both fall. Many Trends series step up in late August 2025 at the same time, across unrelated terms, which Ads doesn’t show. We think that may be a change in how Trends measures, not in what people search for, so no headline on this page rests on Trends alone.

Method

• Keywords. We chose 87 terms in six groups: generic proxy terms, generic scraping terms, AI-scraping terms, anti-bot terms, proxy brands and scraping-tool brands. The full list is in the keyword CSV. We used one spelling per brand.
• Search volumes. These are Google Ads (Keyword Planner) estimates from DataForSEO’s Google Ads Search Volume endpoint. We pulled monthly figures for October 2022–August 2026 for the US and worldwide (Google allows four years back), and for September 2025–August 2026 for 23 other countries. Settings: Google Search only (no partner sites), all languages. “Average a month” is the mean of the 12 monthly estimates in each window.
• Merged keywords. Google Ads gives near-identical keywords the same combined number. We treat keywords with identical monthly series in both the US and worldwide pulls as one term and count them once: cheap proxy = proxy cheap · web scraping = web scraper = web scraping tool · web scraping api = scraping api · serp api = serpapi · ai web scraper = ai web scraping · bypass cloudflare = cloudflare bypass.
• Left out of totals and rankings, because the words have other common meanings: “playwright” (also the word for a dramatist); “puppeteer” (also a puppet performer); “browser use” (generic phrase as well as the AI-agent library); “geonode” (also an open-source GIS platform). They are still in the CSV.
• Implausible spikes. A month that is at least 100,000 and more than 50 times the keyword’s median month is treated as a data error and left out (12 keyword-months, for example “web scraping” at 24,900,000 in May 2025). None falls in the two comparison windows. The raw values are kept in the monthly CSV.
• Risers and fallers compare average monthly searches in September 2025–August 2026 with October 2022–September 2023, the earliest full 12 months available. Using two 12-month windows avoids seasonal swings. Only terms with at least 100 searches a month in the first window are ranked.
• Google Trends. We pulled weekly worldwide and US web-search interest from 1 January 2022 to 26 September 2026, for seven comparison groups of up to five terms. We report yearly averages of the weekly values, skipping weeks Google marks as missing.
• Cost. 39 paid API tasks (25 Google Ads at $0.09 and 14 Google Trends at $0.011) cost $2.404. Every response is saved with its cost.
• Verification. A script re-reads the saved API responses and recomputes every number on this page and in the CSVs.

Caveats

• Modeled estimates. Google Ads volumes are rounded into buckets (for example 2,900, 3,600, 4,400). Small changes can be a jump from one bucket to the next, and low-volume terms are especially rough.
• Merging hides detail. When Google merges variants, we can’t split their volume. “Web scraping”, “web scraper” and “web scraping tool” share one number.
• Brand searches aren’t market share. They include existing customers, job seekers and people reading news about a company, and they say nothing about revenue or traffic volume. Rebrands and campaigns also move them: Smartproxy became Decodo in 2025.
• English keywords only. Non-English searches aren’t counted, so countries outside the English-speaking world are understated. The worldwide figures are Google’s own worldwide estimates, not the sum of our countries.
• Ambiguous terms. “Proxy server” and “free proxy” are mostly consumer searches, for example people trying to reach blocked sites. That is why the country table also shows totals without them. Some brand names may pick up unrelated searches.
• Google Trends is a different source. It is a sampled, normalized index, not counts, and it disagrees with Ads on several generic terms (see above). We don’t combine the two.
• Interest isn’t intent. A search for “bypass cloudflare” might come from a developer, a researcher or a site owner testing their own defenses. This page reports search volumes and makes no judgement about any use.

Download the data

• Keywords (CSV): every term, its group, merges and flags, and its US and worldwide averages and changes.
• Monthly (CSV): raw monthly estimates, October 2022–August 2026, US and worldwide, for every term, including the flagged months.
• Countries (CSV): average monthly searches by country and keyword group, September 2025–August 2026.

Cite as: ProxyPicker, “Proxy & Scraping Search Demand Report”, 2 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/proxy-scraping-search-demand/. Search-volume estimates: Google Ads keyword data, retrieved through the DataForSEO API.

Trend index: Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends), retrieved through the DataForSEO API.

Related: The Scraping Workforce · Anti-Bot Census · Best scraping APIs · Best residential proxies · Proxy Pricing Transparency Report · Residential IP Supply by Country (what providers claim, against internet users).

Press & data requests: email [email protected] for interviews, the raw data behind this page, or corrections. See also our contact page.