i had the same reaction, but i looked to see what google's tos was for things like this and i found https://serpapi.com/ , which apparently has been around for 5 years and also offers paid services for scraping google search. if their homepage is to be believed, there are large companies using their service. i'm very surprised that google hasn't taken steps to block them.

You can use Google without agreeing to their ToS, so technically it shouldn't matter, but practically, if their lawyers come knocking, that's a different story.

I wouldn’t be surprised if actually it’s just a ChatGPT prompt “What google search autocomplete would return for this query:”

seems easier than reverse engineering/scraping google search autocomplete