I just shipped a Google Trends scraper as an Apify Actor (https://apify.com/swiftscrape/google-trends-fast-scraper), and the most interesting part wasn't building it — it was a blocking bug that only showed up in production, on the platform, that I couldn't reproduce locally no matter what I tried.
If you've ever tried to scrape Google Trends and had it work on your laptop but mysteriously fail behind proxies, this one's for you. The root cause is non-obvious and I couldn't find it documented anywhere, so here's the whole thing.
Why build another Google Trends scraper?
Google Trends has no official API. There are scrapers out there, but the most-used one on the market is slow (runs take minutes), it charges you even when it returns nothing, and its multi-term comparison breaks when called from AI agents. Its reviews are full of "ran for 20 minutes, returned nothing, cost me money."
That's a wedge. Same data, but: fast, and you only pay for terms that actually return data — failed, blocked or empty terms are free. If a scraper is unreliable, that's the developer's problem, not the user's bill.
