Google Now Requires JavaScript

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.

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 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, including:

Users with JavaScript intentionally disabled
Users who rely on accessibillty tools
SEO Rank and Data Tracking Tools

Google also has many other motives for this requirement that have nothing to do with the web search experience of Google users. It's 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. Displaying ads is important in order for Google to profit from your searches, and requiring JavaScript forces more users to see the ads.

Why Would JavaScript be Disabled in Your Browser?

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.

Which browsers are affected?

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:

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.

Affects on 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.

How has this affected SerpApi?

We at SerpApi were fortunate to be minimally impacted. Our Ludicrous Speed and Ludicrous Speed Max features already pre-solved Google's JavaScript challenge. So searches with these features enabled were unaffected by Google's initial rollout of the JavaScript requirement. Google Search API searches without these features briefly had slightly elevated latency, but quickly returned to the usual fast response times.

Google later increased the difficulty of these challenges, which briefly interrupted our ability to perform web searches. However, thanks to the dedicated efforts of our engineers we were quickly able to resolve the problem.

What to expect going forward

It's hard to say what Google might do going forward, as this was an unusual and unexpected change from them. However, at SerpApi we're confident in our ability to handle any new variations to these changes Google might introduce. Google Flights and Google Trends were previously the most difficult engines to scrape. They've now applied the same requirements to their web search engine, so at this point it's unlikely further changes will increase the difficulty of scraping SERP results.