Buyer's guide
SerpApi alternatives in 2026
SerpApi is excellent and expensive: $15–25 per 1k at entry, monthly resets and hourly throughput caps. Every alternative below is judged against SerpApi: what you save, and what you give up.
We make SerpKite
Ranking
Our picks, by use case
-
1$1.00 → $0.60 / 1k
SerpKite
Best for: SerpApi users whose volume is mostly Google web search and verticals
Covers the Google engines most SerpApi customers use (web, News, Images, Videos, Maps, Places, Reviews, Shopping, Scholar, Patents, Autocomplete and Lens) at $0.80 per 1k at entry vs $15–25, and $0.60 vs $3.75 around 1M. The migration guide maps
engine=calls to/v1endpoints.Strengths
70–95% lower list price on Google, credits that never reset, per-second rate limits instead of hourly caps, Markdown and compact output, and a 0.5-credit batch lane with webhooks.
Watch out for
Google only until Q1 2027 (no Bing, Baidu, Amazon or YouTube). No SOC 2 yet and no legal shield. Fewer niche SERP widgets parsed.
-
2$4.00 → $1.00 / 1k
SearchApi
Best for: SerpApi users who need the multi-engine catalogue at a lower price
The nearest like-for-like: a SerpApi-style catalogue of about 60 engines with similar parameter conventions, at $4.00 → $1.00 per 1k instead of $15–25 → ~$1.96.
What you gain vs SerpApi
Keeps multi-engine breadth, adds ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answer APIs, and offers $2M legal protection comparable to SerpApi's shield.
What you give up vs SerpApi
Monthly credits, fewer SDKs and less support depth. SerpApi is suing it over alleged trade secrets.
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3$1.00 → $0.30 / 1k
Serper
Best for: SerpApi users who only call Google web search and want it simple
Strips SerpApi down to fast Google search in 10 verticals, at $1.00 per 1k at entry and $0.30 on its largest pack.
What you gain vs SerpApi
About 15× cheaper at entry, a 1–2 s latency claim, and framework defaults in LangChain and CrewAI.
What you give up vs SerpApi
Credits that expire after 6 months, no official SDKs, and far fewer parsed SERP features than SerpApi.
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4$1.00 → $0.14 / 1k
Scrapingdog
Best for: SerpApi users optimizing for the lowest list price at scale
The cheapest public list price here: $0.29 per 1k around 1M versus SerpApi's $3.75, down to $0.136, and it keeps extras like Google AI Mode, Lens and Trends.
What you gain vs SerpApi
An order of magnitude lower volume price; Trends and Lens endpoints like SerpApi's.
What you give up vs SerpApi
Monthly credits, AI Overview only on Advanced, and thinner docs and support.
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5$0.60 / 2.00 → $0.60 / 2.00 / 1k
DataForSEO
Best for: SerpApi users building SEO tools who need more than SERPs
Replaces per-search pricing with a $0.60 per 1k queue and adds keyword volume, backlinks and on-page data that SerpApi doesn't sell.
What you gain vs SerpApi
Never-expiring credits, SEO datasets, and Bing, YouTube, Baidu and Naver coverage.
What you give up vs SerpApi
The queue takes about 5 minutes and live mode is $2.00 per 1k. The task-based API is a bigger migration than a parameter swap.
-
6$1.50 → custom / 1k
Bright Data / Oxylabs
Best for: Enterprises leaving SerpApi that want one vendor for proxies and SERPs
Proxy networks with SERP APIs on top. They own their IP supply and match SerpApi's multi-engine reach under an enterprise contract.
What you gain vs SerpApi
Scale, multi-engine coverage and procurement-friendly contracts at $1.00–1.50 per 1k at entry.
What you give up vs SerpApi
KYC can take days and the dashboards are complex. Oxylabs is named in the Reddit suit alongside SerpApi.
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7$1.23 → $0.35 / 1k
HasData
Best for: Small SerpApi users paying for a plan they don't fill
Google SERP and vertical APIs with 1k free credits a month and Light plans from $1.23 per 1k, under a tenth of SerpApi's entry price.
What you gain vs SerpApi
A recurring free tier and low volume pricing ($0.35 around 1M).
What you give up vs SerpApi
Monthly credits, Google-focused with no multi-engine breadth, fewer agent features.
Features
Feature comparison
| SerpKite | SerpApi | SearchApi | Serper | Scrapingdog | DataForSEO | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real Google results | ||||||
| Google web + core verticals News, Images, Maps, Shopping, Scholar… | ||||||
| ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini answers | Planned | Partial | ||||
| Bing / DDG / Brave / Yandex | Planned (Q1 2027) | Bing, Brave | Bing and others | |||
| Markdown output | Since Aug 2026 | |||||
| Resolved final URLs (post-/goto) | Guaranteed | |||||
| Page content in the same call | include_content | Separate endpoint | ||||
| Async batch + webhooks | 50% off | Partial | ||||
| Official SDKs TypeScript, Python, Go; LangChain and CrewAI tools | TS, Python, Go | 11 languages | ||||
| Official MCP server | ||||||
| Credits never expire | 6 months | |||||
| Spend caps and per-key limits | ||||||
| Failed / empty results free | Incl. empty-200 detection | |||||
| Public status with latency | p50 / p95 | Status page | ||||
| No query logs / DPA SerpKite: No query logs · results cached ≤ 24 h, no identity | Default | Enterprise | ||||
| Legal shield | No (honest policy) | $2M | $2M | |||
| SOC 2 | Planned |
Check = yes, cross = no, dash = not verified. SerpKite rows marked "Planned" are on the roadmap, not live.
Price
Price per 1,000 Google searches
| SerpKite | SerpApi | SearchApi | Serper | Scrapingdog | DataForSEO | Bright Data | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,500 on signup + 1,000/mo, no card | 250/mo | 100 requests | 2,500 once, no card | 100 credits | $1 trial | 5k/mo |
| Entry, ~$50 pack $ per 1k searches | $0.80 | $15–25 | $4.00 | $1.00 | $1.00 | $0.60 / 2.00 | $1.50 |
| ~100k searches / month $ per 1k | $0.60 | $7.25 | $2.50 | $0.75 | $0.45 | $0.60 / 2.00 | $1.31 |
| ~1M searches / month $ per 1k | $0.60 | $3.75 | $1.50 | $0.50 | $0.29 | $0.60 / 2.00 | $1.30 |
| Best public list price $ per 1k | $0.60 | $1.96 | $1.00 | $0.30 | $0.14 | $0.60 / 2.00 | custom |
| Credit expiry | Never | Monthly reset | Not stated | 6 months | Monthly | Never | Monthly |
Public list prices for Google web search, verified on vendor pages on 2026-09-28. "Entry" is the ~$50 pack or plan (SerpKite also has a $10 pack at $1.00 per 1k). SerpKite's self-serve packs stop at 500K credits; larger volumes are quoted on request. Expiring credits raise the effective price if you don't use them in time. See SerpKite pricing.
Methodology
How we rank
We rank by fit for a use case, not by a single score. For each vendor we look at:
- Effective price: list price per 1k at four volumes, plus credit expiry and whether failed or empty results are billed.
- Correctness: Google parity of the top 10, and resolved destination URLs (after Google's
/gotochange). - Speed and reliability: p50/p95 latency and success rate, counting "200 OK, empty" as a failure.
- Agent ergonomics: output formats, token cost, MCP server, SDKs and framework integrations.
- Terms and trust: spend caps, data retention, DPA, compliance and how data is collected.
Measured results (latency, success rate, URL correctness) come from a reproducible benchmark with a public query set and scripts. Results are published monthly on /benchmarks. Until a run is published there, this ranking uses published features and list prices only, and we don't quote performance numbers.
Try it
One request to compare for yourself
curl https://api.serpkite.com/v1/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SERPKITE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"q":"best espresso machine 2026","country":"us","format":"markdown"}'1 credit per page of 10 results, SERP features included. Run it in the playground without signing up.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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