As of January 15, 2025, Google made significant changes to its search engine. Users are now required to have JavaScript enabled in the browser in order to access Google Search results. Whatever Google's intentions behind the changes may have been, this had far-flung effects for different users across the internet.

Impact for Users with JavaScript Disabled

Many users intentionally disable JavaScript in the browser for security reasons. Having JavaScript enabled in the browser can make you more vulnerable to malicious actors. Disabling JavaScript can also help circumvent pop-up ads, prevent companies from tracking you, and speed up your browsing experience.

Users have specifically observed the issue when using Firefox Extended Support Release version 128 without JavaScript. However, other browsers are affected by this as well.

As a quick experiment, I tried turning off JavaScript in Chrome and performing a Google search. I got this:

And similarly in Safari:

SEO Rank and Data Tracking Tools

SEO tools were significantly impacted by the change. Requiring JavaScript makes web scraping more difficult. Since most SEO tools rely heavily on web scraping to get SERP data, requiring JavaScript caused significant lags and outages for SEO research providers. Developers and website owners depend on these tools to understand the impact of their SEO efforts.

Accessibility Concerns

JavaScript has the potential to break accessibility. For this reason, users who rely on accessibility tools may have JavaScript disabled in the browser. Google requiring these users to enable JavaScript could introduce extra complications for them.

Why is Google Requiring JavaScript?

We can only speculate as to the reason Google pushed these changes. A Google spokesperson recently told TechCrunch "Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information.” However, there are many legitimate users, companies, and services negatively impacted by the changes. While the spokesperson noted that “fewer than .1%” of Google users have JavaScript disabled, that is still likely several million users. It seems likely the change is geared at promoting the AI Overviews feature (which requires JavaScript to execute), ensuring ads are displayed, and collecting data for analytics.

Tools Not Impacted

Not all web scraping and SEO tools were affected by the change. Up-to-date reports say the popular SEO tools Ahrefs and Semrush weren't affected.

We at SerpApi were fortunate to be minimally impacted. Our Ludicrous Speed and Ludicrous Speed Max features already included the necessary JavaScript support. So searches with these features enabled have been unaffected by Google's changes. Google Search API searches without these features currently have slightly elevated latency, but we are working on an optimization that will bring average response times back down to what they usually are (less than 2 seconds).

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Further Reading