Data Compliance and Terms of Service Considerations
What to think about regarding ToS, robots.txt, and data usage when consuming search results.
What it means
Search engines' own terms of service typically restrict automated querying and scraping to varying degrees, and a managed search API provider generally bears that compliance relationship rather than passing it to you directly — but what you do with the retrieved data (storing personal information, using it for a restricted purpose like automated decisioning) is still your responsibility, not the provider's.
In practice
A recruiting-sourcing tool that pulls public profile data via search and stores it long-term to build candidate databases needs to check the terms of the platforms that data originated from (many professional networks explicitly restrict automated scraping of profile data), not just the search API provider's terms, since the two are separate compliance relationships.
Tradeoffs
Leaning entirely on 'the API provider handles compliance' is a common but risky assumption — provider terms typically cover the search-retrieval step itself, not everything you subsequently do with the data, so anything involving personal data, regulated industries, or storage at scale deserves its own compliance review rather than inheriting the provider's.