You start a Google Trends scrape. It runs for twenty minutes. It comes back with nothing. You already paid for it.
That's not a one-off bug, it's the most common complaint on scrapers in this category, across the board. Not "wrong data," not "missing feature." Just: ran, cost money, returned nothing. I wanted to understand why that keeps happening, and whether it's actually fixable.
It's not Google Trends being flaky, it's IP reputation
Google Trends doesn't have a public API. Every scraper, mine included, talks to the same internal endpoint the website itself uses. That endpoint is aggressively defensive: it rate-limits fast, and it treats requests from cloud/datacenter IPs very differently from requests that look like they come from an actual browser on an actual residential connection.
I proved this to myself the boring way: I ran the exact same request from my own dev machine, no proxy, and got an instant 429. No warm-up, no browser fingerprint, just a blunt rejection. That's the failure mode hiding behind "ran 20 minutes, returned nothing." The scraper isn't broken, it's being told no, and most scrapers don't handle "no" gracefully, they just return nothing, and bill you anyway.
