On January 17, 2025, Google announced that users have to enable JavaScript to use Google Search. This JavaScript requirement for Google Search is part of an update intended to protect search results from malicious actors and improve the overall user experience. This change may signal a broader trend among search engines to enhance security.

In today's article, we'll give a quick overview of what this change means for businesses and individual users. We'll also explain why this change does not negatively affect our users. Finally, we'll briefly showcase how to send requests to Google Search JavaScript-enabled environments with a headless browser and JavaScript if you use your own custom tools.

What it means for users and businesses

As primary reasons for the update, Google cited security enhancements, spam prevention, and an improved user experience. This requirement ensures web pages interactive elements function properly, and making web pages interactive helps prevent automated abuse. More specifically, this change is aimed at blocking bots, scrapers, and SEO tools that rely on non-JavaScript-based methods to extract search result data.

What does this update mean for individual users and businesses? Individuals will have to enable JavaScript, otherwise, some Google Search features may become unavailable. To make sure you have JavaScript enabled on your browser, refer to this page and screenshot:

Meanwhile, businesses that regularly use Google Search for market research and tools that analyze search results for ranking data face significant challenges, as traditional scraping methods without JavaScript support may no longer work. While other search engines haven't announced similar requirements yet, some SEO tools have already reported disruptions, making it necessary for companies to adapt their approaches to continue monitoring search results effectively.

Oxylabs API users won’t be affected

With this update targeting automated activities, a natural question arises: does it impact Oxylabs' scraping solutions? We can assure that our web scraping solutions (Web Scraper API, for instance) remain unaffected. Our clients can expect the same performance, reliability, and scraping volumes they usually rely on. While this update may cause concern, the Oxylabs infrastructure team is prepared to meet any challenges and keep customer web scraping operations running smooth.

Nonetheless, if you have any questions, please contact our support team via live chat on our website or at support@oxylabs.io. 

How to send requests with a headless browser: short guide

If you're not using Oxylabs API to scrape Google, we've prepared a custom Python scraping guide for you to follow.

First off, let's install the prerequisite libraries. We'll need Selenium and webdriver for the headless browser, also fake_useragent to try and bypass the CAPTCHA. To access Google Search features programmatically, we'll need to set up the right environment:

rom selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from fake_useragent import UserAgent

ua = UserAgent()

# Set up Chrome options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("--headless")  # Run in headless mode
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")  # Sometimes needed for headless mode
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920x1080")  # Set window size
options.add_argument(f"user-agent={ua.chrome}")  # Set a chrome user-agent

# Initialize WebDriver
service = Service(ChromeDriverManager().install())
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=service, options=options)

query = "python web scraping"
url = f"https://www.google.com/search?q={query.replace(' ', '+')}"

driver.get(url)

Now that we have the browser set up, let's extract some Google Search result titles and print them out to the console. For that, we will need to find some CSS identifier for the titles by inspecting the google search result HTML:

That identifier could be div.F0FGWb. Let's put it to use and locate these titles in our code using our initialized driver:

driver.get(url)
results = driver.find_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.F0FGWb")  # Select result blocks

for result in results:
   print(result.text)
driver.quit()

Once we run the code, the results should look similar to this: 

Keep in mind that with minimal effort of bypassing technical challenges Google has implemented, you might run into CAPTCHA. If you’re not able to bypass it, you should give our API a try.