Migrate from the Google Custom Search JSON API

import os, requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1",
    params={
        "key": os.environ["GOOGLE_API_KEY"],
        "cx": os.environ["GOOGLE_CSE_ID"],
        "q": "site:docs.python.org asyncio",
        "start": 1,
        "num": 10,
    },
    timeout=30,
)
for item in res.json().get("items", []):
    print(item["title"], item["link"])

import os, requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.serpkite.com/customsearch/v1",
    params={
        "key": os.environ["SERPKITE_API_KEY"],
        "cx": os.environ["GOOGLE_CSE_ID"],
        "q": "site:docs.python.org asyncio",
        "start": 1,
        "num": 10,
    },
    timeout=30,
)
for item in res.json().get("items", []):
    print(item["title"], item["link"])

Two lines change: the hostname and the key. cx is accepted and ignored, so you can leave it in place while you migrate. When you want People Also Ask, knowledge graph or Markdown output, move to the native POST /v1/search endpoint or the official SDKs (npm install serpkite, pip install serpkite).

• cx does nothing. If your engine was restricted to a list of sites in the Programmable Search console, recreate it with siteSearch (one site) or site:a.com OR site:b.com in q.
• Results are full Google, ranked as google.com ranks them. A CSE with custom ranking, refinements or promotions will look different.
• Keys in URLs end up in logs. Prefer Authorization: Bearer skt_live_… as a header. The key query parameter is supported for drop-in compatibility with CSE.
• No 10,000-a-day cap, but there is a per-second rate limit per plan (5 requests/second on the free tier). Handle 429 with the Retry-After header.
• Errors use SerpKite's error body {"error":{"code","message","request_id"}}, not Google's error.errors[]. If you parse Google error reasons, switch on error.code instead.
• Need more than the CSE fields? The native POST /v1/search returns results, people_also_ask, knowledge_graph, answer_box and Markdown output with the same key. With the Python SDK it is SerpKite().search("site:docs.python.org asyncio", country="us"). See the Google Search API.

1. 1 Create a free account and copy your skt_live_… key from the dashboard.
2. 2 Replace https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1 with https://api.serpkite.com/customsearch/v1.
3. 3 Replace your Google API key with the SerpKite key (or send it as Authorization: Bearer).
4. 4 If your engine was site-restricted, add siteSearch or site: operators to the query.
5. 5 Run your test suite or a handful of real queries and compare items[].link and title.
6. 6 Update error handling for 401, 402, 429 and 503 with the SerpKite error codes. Failed calls are not billed and are safe to retry.
7. 7 Set a monthly spend cap and a low-balance alert in the dashboard, then deploy before January 1, 2027.
8. 8 Optional, later: move to POST /v1/search or the official TypeScript, Python or Go SDK for People Also Ask, knowledge graph and Markdown output.

Google's own list price for the JSON API was $5 per 1,000 queries after 100 free queries a day, with a 10,000-a-day cap. SerpKite has no daily cap; each /customsearch/v1 call costs 1 credit. SerpKite packs: $1.00 per 1k on the $10 pack down to $0.60 on the largest self-serve pack; larger volumes on request, enterprise from $0.18. Competitor list prices verified on vendor pages on 2026-09-28. See pricing.

• Read the blog post
• Custom Search (CSE-compatible) API reference
• Migrate from Bing Search API
• Migrate from SerpApi
• Migrate from Tavily