If you have a tool or website that uses the unsupported Google autocomplete API, be warned that your access will be shut off next month.  On August 10, 2015, Google will begin restricting access to the autocomplete API.

The autocomplete API gave suggestions for commonly used terms to complete the search query a user is typing in.  However, Google never officially supported this API, but they made no move to remove that access until now.

We built autocomplete as a complement to Search, and never intended that it would exist disconnected from the purpose of anticipating user search queries. Over time we’ve realized that while we can conceive of uses for an autocomplete data feed outside of search results that may be valuable, overall the content of our automatic completions are optimized and intended to be used in conjunction with web search results, and outside of the context of a web search don’t provide a meaningful user benefit.

As it is an unsupported and unpublished API, it isn’t likely Google will grant special permission to some for the continued use of the API.  Instead, they are pointing users to the Google Custom Search Engine, for those that want to continue offering a site: search on their site with the autocomplete enabled.  For people using it for the site: search functionality, this would also mean the ability to monetize those results, if the website wishes to.

But it also means that tools will no longer be able to provide the autocomplete functionality.   While Ubersuggest is probably the most well known of the stand-alone tools offering autocomplete suggestions, it also impacts many other tools that were providing autocomplete data for various types of tools, including keyword research and content idea suggestions.

If you use it for this type of research, you will want to ensure you do your research prior to August 10th.

That said, autocomplete data will still be provided in the Google search results, however the downside is you will need to do the searches individually and record it.

There will definitely be many unhappy SEOs and PPC’ers who regularly make use of tools that pull data from this API, and it doesn’t appear there will be anything to use in its place, save the old fashioned way.