TEARDOWN 79 · REVIEWED 2026-08-20
Oxylabs
Oxylabs is a proxy network and web-scraping infrastructure company — it operates its own residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxy network, plus SERP and web-scraper APIs, that other companies build data-collection tools on top of rather than sell to end users directly. It doesn't sell an SEO dashboard; it sells the network and scraping infrastructure underneath one.
Oxylabs operates its own residential proxy network — 175M+ IPs across 195+ countries by its own account, sourced through an opt-in consent model — plus SERP and web-scraping APIs, which is the same kind of standing network-and-evasion infrastructure a scraping-based SEO tool would otherwise have to build or rent from a company like this one.
What you lose building it yourself
- ✕A residential/ISP/mobile proxy network at hundreds-of-millions-of-IPs scale — without it, a DIY scraper gets blocked or rate-limited fast
- ✕A pre-built Web Scraper API and SERP Scraper API that already handle JavaScript rendering and CAPTCHA-heavy targets
- ✕195+-country, city-level IP targeting tuned against site defenses, with a vendor-claimed 99.95% success rate
BUILD YOUR OWN · NOT OFFERED
Not offered here — Oxylabs' product is exactly the piece a DIY scraper would otherwise need: a proxy network large enough to avoid IP-based blocking at scale, plus SERP and web-scraping APIs kept working as sites change their defenses. An AI coding tool can wire up Oxylabs' own API in an afternoon, but that means renting this infrastructure, not building an equivalent to it.
StackNone — a single scraper hitting sites directly gets blocked within hours at any real volume; this is the infrastructure other tools' DIY stacks call.
Similar tools
Free alternative: Scrapy — a widely-used open-source Python scraping framework that covers writing and running the scraper itself; it includes no proxy network, so a DIY build still gets IP-blocked at any real scale without pairing it with something like Oxylabs' own proxies
QUESTIONS
Is there a free tier?
Not for the proxy network itself, though free trials are available on datacenter proxies and the Web Scraper API, plus a 2,000-result free trial on the SERP Scraper API, no credit card required.
Does Oxylabs scrape Google directly, or use an official API?
Google doesn't offer a public API for organic results at this scale, so Oxylabs' SERP Scraper API collects results live through its own infrastructure rather than an official Google search API — the same pattern used by other SERP data providers.
Is Oxylabs itself an SEO tool?
Not directly — it doesn't sell keyword or backlink dashboards. It sells the proxy network and scraping APIs that other data-collection and SEO tools can build on top of, similar to how some tools use Bright Data or DataForSEO as a backend.