Google Trends API: the 200 OK that means you got soft-blocked

Google Trends has no public API. What it has is the same internal JSON endpoints the trends.google.com single-page app calls — and those endpoints do something most REST clients aren't built to survive: they answer with HTTP 200 and an empty body when Google decides you look like a bot. Quick answer A 200 OK from Google Trends' widgetdata endpoints does not mean you got data. If the response body is empty, Google soft-blocked the request without bothering to send a 429. The fix is to stop trusting the status code alone: check resp.text.strip() on every call that's supposed to return a payload, and if it's empty, rotate the proxy session and retry exactly like you would on a 429 — because that's what it functionally is. if status == 200 : if require_body and not resp . text . strip (): # Soft block: Google returns 200 with empty body when it detects bots. # Treat the same as 429 — rotate session and retry. logger . warning ( " %s: HTTP 200 but empty body (soft block, attempt %d/%d) " , ...) if proxy_cfg is not None : new_sid = _fresh_session_id () current_proxy_url = await proxy_cfg . new_url ( session_id = new_sid ) await asyncio . sleep ( delay ) continue return resp Why does a working response start with )]}' ? Every Trends JSON endpoint prepends an XSSI-protection prefix before the actual JSON body — a defence against cross-site script inclusion attacks that predates fetch() . Naive json.loads(resp.text) throws a JSONDecodeError on a perfectly healthy response. Worse, the prefix isn't even consistent: /trends/api/explore sends )]}'\n (no comma), some widgetdata endpoints send )]}',\n (with a comma). We check the longer variant first so a response using the short prefix doesn't get mis-stripped: XSSI_PREFIX = " )]} ' , \n " XSSI_PREFIX_NO_COMMA = " )]} ' \n " def _strip_xssi_prefix ( body : str ) -> str : if body . startswith ( XSSI_PREFIX ): return body [ len ( XSSI_PREFIX ):] if body . startswith ( XSSI_PREFIX_NO_COMMA ): return body [ len ( XSSI_PREFIX_NO_COMMA