SERP API Pricing Compared: SerpApi, Serper.dev, Bright Data, DataForSEO, and 25+ Alternatives (2026)
A full breakdown of SERP and web-search API pricing in 2026, from SerpApi and Serper.dev to Bright Data, DataForSEO, and AI-native search APIs, with the direct answer up front.
- Which SERP API is cheapest, and which one should you actually use?
- How this comparison works
- Direct competitors: Google/multi-engine SERP APIs
- Enterprise scraping infrastructure with SERP endpoints
- SEO data platforms
- AI-native / agent search APIs
- General scraping platforms
- First-party and DIY options
- Where this leaves the decision
- Frequently asked questions
Which SERP API is cheapest, and which one should you actually use?
There’s no single cheapest option - it depends on volume and what you’re optimizing for:
- Under a few thousand requests a month: start free. Serply gives new accounts 2,500 free credits; most vendors on this list have some form of free tier or trial.
- Feature-comparable direct rivals at production volume: among vendors that return real-time, structured Google/Bing SERP JSON with comparable coverage, Serply’s prepaid packs are priced at or below SerpApi, Bright Data, and Google’s own Custom Search API at every monthly volume from 10,000 to 10,000,000 requests - see the interactive comparison on our pricing page.
- Rock-bottom headline price, if you can live with the trade-offs: ultra-cheap generic scrape/credit resellers like Scrapingdog, Zyte, and DataForSEO’s queued Standard tier undercut most of the category, including Serply, on price alone. What you give up is covered below.
- You’re building an AI agent, not scraping a SERP: a raw SERP API isn’t actually what you want. Look at Brave Search API, Tavily, Exa, or Linkup instead - they return pre-cleaned, ranked context sized for a model, not a results page to parse yourself.
The rest of this post is the full landscape behind that answer: every category of vendor competing for this budget line, what they actually charge, and where each one fits.
How this comparison works
Rates below are pulled from each vendor’s public self-serve pricing page as of August 2026 and expressed as $ per 1,000 Google/SERP-equivalent requests so they’re comparable across vendors that price in credits, transactions, or named plans rather than a flat per-search rate. Vendors change pricing without notice - confirm current rates before making a purchasing decision, and treat anything here beyond a vendor’s highest published tier as directional, not a quote.
Direct competitors: Google/multi-engine SERP APIs
These are Serply’s closest substitutes - real-time structured SERP JSON, developer-first, pay per search.
| Vendor | Starting price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | ~$25/1,000 at low volume, down to ~$5.50/1,000 at 500K/month | Category incumbent, in business since 2017. 100+ APIs across Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others. SOC 2 Type II certified. Carries a monthly floor. |
| Serper.dev | $50 for 50,000 credits, down to $0.30/1,000 at the top tier | Sells credit packs rather than subscriptions; credits valid six months, 2,500 free to evaluate. Covers roughly 12 Google endpoints only - no Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, or Amazon. |
| Scrapingdog | From ~$0.26/1,000, 200 free credits | 17+ Google APIs including AI Overview and AI Mode support, multi-engine. One of the cheapest headline rates in the category. |
| SearchAPI.io | ~$0.60-1.00/1,000 | Mid-tier, multi-engine. |
| ValueSERP | $50/month for 25,000 searches (~$1.60/1,000, falling to $1.00 at a million) | Traject Data. Limited AI Overview parsing. |
| Scale SERP | Priced per “searches and batches” | Traject Data, sister product to ValueSERP. Google-focused, priced in plain usage language rather than a credit economy. |
| Zenserp | Mid-range | Google, Bing, and YouTube with a simple plan structure. |
| Serpstack (apilayer) | ~$6/1,000 | Premium tier. |
| HasData | Priced for agencies/mid-size teams | Structured SERP across Google, Bing, Baidu, and Yandex through one interface. |
A longer tail of smaller, newer entrants - SerpWow, SerpBase, Talordata, Scrape.do, Scrape Creators, and cloro - compete mostly on price and pay-as-you-go terms rather than certifications or breadth of engine coverage. cloro, for example, prices in async-call credits that work out to roughly $2.40/1,000 searches at its smallest pack, falling toward $0.92/1,000 at its largest.
Enterprise scraping infrastructure with SERP endpoints
Proxy-first infrastructure vendors that added a SERP-specific endpoint on top of a broader scraping product.
| Vendor | Starting price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | ~$1.50/1,000 | Proxy-first, sold on committed volume rather than small self-serve packs. |
| Oxylabs | $1.00/1,000 on the $49/month Micro plan, down to $0.80/1,000 on the $249/month Advanced plan | SERP endpoint inside its Web Scraper API, with city- and coordinate-level targeting and batch webhook delivery. A separate Fast API returns 95% of requests in under 1.11 seconds. |
| Decodo (formerly Smartproxy), NetNut | Committed-volume proxy pricing | Layer SERP endpoints on top of existing residential/datacenter proxy pools. |
| Zyte | ~$0.43/1,000 for organics only | Proxy vendor with a SERP endpoint; one of the cheaper options in this tier. |
SEO data platforms
Vendors where SERP data is one endpoint inside a much larger product, aimed at buyers who want more than a raw results feed.
DataForSEO is the main threat here if the buyer wants more than SERPs: 60+ endpoints spanning SERP, Keywords, Backlinks, On-Page, and Domain Analytics data. After roughly an 80% price cut in September 2025 - triggered by Google’s removal of the num=100 SERP parameter, which broke the economics of bulk-fetching 100 results per query - its Standard queue now runs $0.60/1,000, the lowest published base rate in the category. The trade-off is that results are queued rather than returned in real time.
SE Ranking, Ahrefs API, and Semrush API bundle SERP data inside a wider SEO suite (rank tracking, backlink indexes, keyword research), so pricing is set at the suite level rather than per SERP request.
AI-native / agent search APIs
An adjacent but rapidly encroaching category. The split that matters: a SERP API returns raw Google results-page JSON for you to clean and rank yourself. An agent-native API returns a short, ranked list of pre-cleaned snippets sized for a model’s context window - a different product, not a drop-in substitute either direction.
- Brave Search API runs a genuinely independent index rather than wrapping Google or Bing, powers 22 million answers a day through its LLM Context API, and scored highest on Agent Score with the lowest average latency (669ms) in one recent agentic-search benchmark.
- Tavily combines search with extraction, crawl, map, and research endpoints as an agent retrieval layer.
- Exa runs its own neural index trained on link prediction, with vertical-specific coverage spanning 70M+ companies for finance use cases and GitHub, Stack Overflow, and technical docs for code use cases.
- Linkup claims a 92% F-score on Verified SimpleQA at €5 per 1,000 standard searches.
- Firecrawl, Parallel, Perplexity Sonar, and Scrapfly round out the category - Sonar in particular returns a prose answer with inline citations rather than results for you to reason over.
General scraping platforms
Apify, ScrapingBee, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Crawlbase, and Nimble reach Google as one target among many rather than a first-class product. Worth noting: G2 reviewers most often name Apify, Oxylabs, and Fivetran as SerpApi alternatives, which reflects how buyers actually shop this category as much as what any vendor markets itself as.
First-party and DIY options
- Google Custom Search JSON API / Programmable Search Engine - Google’s own first-party option, at $5/1,000 queries, capped at 10,000 queries/day (~300K/month). Limited, and not a true mirror of the organic results page you’d get from a real search.
- Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Foundry - Microsoft retired the standalone Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025. The replacement isn’t a drop-in and bills around $35 per 1,000 transactions, only usable inside Foundry’s Agent Service. That retirement is a large part of why this market re-shuffled over the past year.
- Roll your own - scraping raw Google HTML remains the alternative to any API, for teams willing to build and maintain the anti-blocking infrastructure themselves.
Where this leaves the decision
If you’re comparing Serply specifically against the vendors closest to it in product shape and price, the interactive slider on our pricing page models real cost at your actual monthly volume against SerpApi, Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, Bright Data, and Google’s own Custom Search API. It’s intentionally scoped to that comparable set rather than every vendor on this page, for the reason covered above: a handful of resellers undercut nearly everyone on headline price, and the fairest way to show that is here, with the context, rather than folded into a chart that can’t carry a paragraph of caveats.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the actual cheapest SERP API? By headline price alone, generic scrape/credit resellers like Scrapingdog (~$0.26/1,000) and DataForSEO’s queued Standard tier ($0.60/1,000) are the cheapest options in this comparison. Whether that’s the right choice depends on whether real-time results, engine coverage, and support match what a “SERP API” actually means for your use case.
What’s the difference between a SERP API and an agent search API? A SERP API returns the raw results-page JSON for a query - organic results, ads, snippets - for you to parse and rank. An agent search API (Brave’s LLM Context API, Tavily, Exa, Linkup) returns a short list of already-cleaned, ranked context sized for an LLM’s prompt window. They solve different problems and aren’t interchangeable.
Why did DataForSEO cut prices so sharply in 2025?
Google removed the num=100 parameter that let SERP vendors fetch 100 results in a single request, which raised the cost of the underlying scraping for anyone billing per 100-result page. DataForSEO’s roughly 80% cut to its Standard queue tier followed that change.
Is scraping Google’s HTML directly a viable alternative to paying for an API? It’s viable if you’re willing to build and continuously maintain anti-blocking infrastructure - rotating IPs, solving CAPTCHAs, keeping up with markup changes - which is the actual product every vendor on this page is selling. For most teams, the API’s price is cheaper than the engineering time to replicate it.