Async and Batch Search Patterns
When to use asynchronous or batch endpoints instead of synchronous single queries.
What it means
A synchronous single-query call blocks until the result comes back, which is fine for one-off lookups but wasteful for a workload that needs hundreds or thousands of queries run together — a batch or async endpoint instead accepts many queries at once, processes them server-side, and returns results via a callback, polling endpoint, or webhook once the batch completes.
In practice
A rank-tracking job that needs to check 5,000 keyword-location combinations overnight is a poor fit for 5,000 sequential synchronous calls; submitting them as a batch job that the provider processes in parallel server-side and returns as a single downloadable result set once complete is both faster overall and typically cheaper per query than the synchronous equivalent.
Tradeoffs
Batch and async endpoints trade immediacy for throughput and often for lower cost per query, but they're the wrong tool for anything a user is actively waiting on in real time — an agent answering a live chat question needs the synchronous path even though it's less efficient per-query at scale.