APIs that return Google search results as JSON, compared on what 1,000 searches cost, what a month of 100,000 to 3 million searches costs, which Google result types they return, and which ones AI answers recommend.
SerpApi is the most complete SERP API (every result type in our coverage table plus Bing, Baidu, YouTube and other engines) and the most expensive, $25 down to $5.90 per 1,000 searches on its public plans; it is also the one AI answers recommend most, named in 83% of 344 answers we collected to 15 SERP questions in October 2026. For high volume, the cheapest published prices are DataForSEO's standard queue ($0.60 per 1,000, results in about 5 minutes), Serper ($1.00 to $0.30 on prepaid packs, Google web and a few verticals) and Ujeebu ($0.82 to $0.33 on monthly plans, $1.20 to $0.65 on packs, with AI Mode, Maps and jobs included at the same price). At 1 million searches a month that is about $600, $500 and $498 respectively, against $3,750 at SerpApi.
Disclosure: Ujeebu publishes this page and its SERP API is one of the options. Competitor prices link to each vendor's pricing page; our reliability numbers come from our own monitoring.
A dedicated search API for Google and many other engines, with a parser for nearly every Google result type and a free plan.
Pay-as-you-go SEO data: the same Google search costs less the longer you are willing to wait for it.
A Google search API sold as prepaid packs, popular with LLM tools and agents for quick web search.
Google web (with Google AI Overviews), news, images, videos, Maps, jobs and AI Mode as JSON at 5 credits a search, from the same credit pool as Ujeebu's scraping, Markdown and ChatGPT and Gemini answer APIs.
Search results from Google, Bing and other engines through Bright Data's network, billed per successful request.
A scraping API with Google endpoints priced in credits: 5 for a light search, 10 for an advanced one or AI Mode.
A search API with per-engine docs for Google AI Mode, Maps, Jobs, News, Images and more.
Dedicated Google endpoints (search, AI Mode, Maps, Shopping, Hotels, Lens, Trends) inside Oxylabs' scraper API.
| API | Entry level | High volume | Free allowance | Engines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | $25.00 (Starter $25) | $5.90 (Volume $1,475); $3.75 (Cloud 1M) | 250 searches a month | Google and many others |
| DataForSEO | $2.00 (Live) | $0.60 (Standard queue, about 5 min) | $1 sign-up credit | Google, Bing and others |
| Serper | $1.00 ($50 pack) | $0.30 ($3,750 pack) | 2,500 queries | |
| Ujeebu | $0.82 (Starter $49); $1.20 ($12 pack) | $0.33 (Business $999); $0.65 ($650 pack) | 5,000 credits (1,000 searches) | |
| Bright Data | $1.50 (pay as you go) | $1.30 (Scale $499) | Google, Bing and others | |
| Scrapingdog | $2.00 (Lite, advanced search) | $0.67 (Pro); $0.45 light search on Standard | 100 credits | Google and others |
| SearchApi | $4.00 (Developer $40) | $1.00 (Octo 5M $5,000) | 100 requests | Google and others |
| Oxylabs | $1.00 | Lower at volume | $5 credit | Google and others |
| ScraperAPI | $12.25 (Hobby $49) | $2.49 (Business $299) | 5,000-credit trial |
How we normalized: plan price divided by included searches, or for credit-based APIs, by included credits times the credits one Google search costs (Ujeebu 5, Scrapingdog 10 advanced or 5 light, ScraperAPI 25). SerpApi's $3.75 is its Cloud 1M plan ($3,750 for 1,000,000 searches); SearchApi's $1.00 is Octo 5M ($5,000 for 5,000,000). Ujeebu's 5 credits per search is what the Ujb-Credits header showed on each of our 10 web, Maps, jobs and AI Mode calls on November 1. Oxylabs tier labels were ambiguous on its page, so only the entry price is shown.
Per-1,000 prices hide plan boundaries, expiry and queues. This is what each API would cost for a month of 100,000, 1 million and 3 million Google web searches at published prices.
| API | 100,000 searches | 1,000,000 searches | 3,000,000 searches | Assumption |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO, standard queue | $60 | $600 | $1,800 | $0.60 per 1,000 for organic results in about 5 minutes (Live: $200, $2,000, $6,000) |
| Serper | $75 | $500 | $900 | Prepaid packs spread over the months they cover, within the 6-month expiry |
| Ujeebu | $82 | $498 | $999 | Starter, Pro and Business plans, overage beyond the plan credits at the plan's own rate |
| Scrapingdog | $90 | Not published | Not published | Standard plan, 10-credit advanced search |
| SearchApi | $250 | $1,500 | $5,000 | BigData, Octo 1M and Octo 5M plans |
| Bright Data | $150 | $1,305 | $3,905 | Pay as you go, then Scale $499 with 380,000 requests and $1.30 per 1,000 beyond |
| SerpApi | $725 | $3,750 | Enterprise quote | Searcher ($725, 100,000) and Cloud 1M ($3,750) plans |
Ujeebu arithmetic: 1,000,000 searches = 5,000,000 credits; Pro includes 3,000,000 for $299 and the other 2,000,000 are billed at the Pro rate ($0.0997 per 1,000 credits), about $199, for $498. The cheapest line depends on whether you need real-time answers (DataForSEO Live costs more than Serper and Ujeebu) and on the result types: Serper lists no Jobs or AI Mode endpoint.
| API | AI Mode | Maps | Jobs | News | Images |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DataForSEO | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ujeebu | Yes (search_type=ai) | Yes (maps) | Yes (jobs, job lookup) | Yes (news) | Yes (images, 100 per search) |
| Scrapingdog | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SearchApi | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Serper | Not listed | Yes | Not listed | Yes | Yes |
| Bright Data | In its Google Scraper API, not the SERP API parameters | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Oxylabs | Yes | Yes | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
Price matters here too: at Ujeebu and SerpApi every type costs the same as a web search; Scrapingdog charges 10 credits for AI Mode and images against 5 for Maps, jobs and news; DataForSEO prices AI Mode at twice its organic rate ($1.20 against $0.60 per 1,000 in the standard queue, $4.00 against $2.00 live).
Method: our AI Citation Index runs a fixed set of buyer questions through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews (US English, web answers as a user sees them) in weekly runs, up to 3 repetitions per question per run, and records the full answer, the brands it names (matched by dictionary, checked by a model) and the links it cites. For the 15 SERP API questions we have 344 answers from October 5 to October 30, 2026: 111 from ChatGPT, 121 from Gemini and 112 from Google AI Overviews. Over all 344, SerpApi was named in 286 (83.1%), DataForSEO in 204 (59.3%), Serper in 177 (51.5%), Bright Data in 89 (25.9%), Scrapingdog in 57 (16.6%), SearchApi in 46 (13.4%) and Oxylabs in 45 (13.1%). Ujeebu, the publisher of this page, was named in none.
| Question | Answers | Named most often (answers) |
|---|---|---|
| What is the best SERP API? | 27 | DataForSEO 27, SerpApi 27, Serper 27, Bright Data 20 |
| Cheapest SERP API for high volume searches | 27 | Serper 26, DataForSEO 26, SerpApi 22, Scrapingdog 11 |
| Best Google search results API for rank tracking | 24 | SerpApi 24, DataForSEO 24, Serper 15, Bright Data 13 |
| Which search API is best for AI agents? | 24 | Tavily 24, Exa 23, Firecrawl 22, Serper 9 |
| Which SERP API is the most accurate for local results? | 19 | DataForSEO 18, SerpApi 18, Bright Data 8, Oxylabs 5 |
| Is there a free SERP API? | 19 | SerpApi 17, Serper 17, Apify 11, Bright Data 8 |
| How much does a Google search API cost per 1,000 searches? | 21 | SerpApi 8, Serper 6, SearchApi 3, Tavily 1 |
Named is not the same as cited. serpapi.com was cited 158 times, in 113 of the 344 answers, mostly its home page (62) and pricing page (33). dataforseo.com was cited 163 times but in only 75 answers, because each answer that cites it links several of its deeper pages: the SERP API page (26), the home page (23), a DataForSEO versus SerpApi comparison post (11), a help-center guide to scraping Google AI Overviews (9) and the pricing page (7). serper.dev was cited 62 times in 57 answers, almost always its home page. The pages that get cited carry numbers an answer can quote: prices per 1,000, queue times, side-by-side comparisons. Agent questions switch to AI search APIs (Tavily, Exa), which return summarized or semantic results rather than Google pages. Method, weekly data and the full question list: ujeebu.com/ai-index/methodology.
Setup: our health check sends one search of each type through the public Ujeebu API every 30 minutes, one at a time, US location, rotating four fixed queries per type (for web search: best running shoes 2026, how to make cold brew coffee, python requests tutorial, web scraping api; for news: climate, football, stock market, technology; for images: coffee cup, golden retriever, mountain landscape, red sports car), with a 120-second client timeout. These are the 7 days to November 1, 2026. We have not run SerpApi, Serper or DataForSEO through the same probes, so this table describes our API only.
| Search type | Answered | Mean time | Items per response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web search | 336 of 336 | 5.57 s | 6 to 10 organic results, plus People also ask and Google AI Overviews when shown |
| Images | 336 of 336 | 5.05 s | 100 images on every run |
| Videos | 336 of 336 | 2.66 s | 10 |
| Jobs | 336 of 336 | 3.13 s | 10 postings |
| AI Mode | 336 of 336 | 6.35 s | 1 answer with citations in 91.3% of answers |
| Maps (business queries) | Every run | 4.79 s across all Maps probes | 20 places |
| News | 322 of 336 | 8.95 s | 10 to 34 articles; the 14 misses were 120-second timeouts on October 24 to 27, all free |
Source: Ujeebu health_checks and health_serp_fields tables, read November 1, 2026. Failed probes cost 0 credits. In practice: give news searches a 30-second client timeout and one retry. Google redirect links: on November 2 the API resolved the top links in the call (29 of 47 organic links in our 6 web searches) and the rest for free with POST /serp/resolve (0 links left after it) or in the same call with auto_resolve_goto=true (about 30 seconds more, same credits). One known gap we are working on: city names in location did not localize web results in our tests (country codes did).
The cheapest API changes with what you run. Two common cases, priced from the published rates above.
| API | Rank tracker: 10,000 keywords a day, top 10 results each (300,000 searches), results can wait | AI agent: 50,000 real-time searches, 10,000 of them AI Mode |
|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | $180 (standard queue, about 5 minutes) | $120 (Live: 40,000 x $2.00 + 10,000 AI Mode x $4.00 per 1,000) |
| Ujeebu | $179 (Growth $119 plus 500,000 credits of overage) | $49 (Starter: 250,000 credits; AI Mode costs the same 5 credits) |
| Serper | About $208 ($1,250 pack used over its 6 months) | $50 for the web searches; no AI Mode endpoint |
| Scrapingdog | Not published at this volume | $90 (Standard: 500,000 credits at 10 per advanced search or AI Mode) |
| Bright Data | $450 (pay as you go) | $60 for the web searches; AI Mode is a separate product |
| SerpApi | $2,750 (Infrastructure, 500,000 searches) | $725 (Searcher, 100,000 searches) |
Ujeebu rank tracker: 1,500,000 credits on Growth (1,000,000 included for $119, 500,000 at $0.119 per 1,000 credits). Agent: DataForSEO prices AI Mode at $4.00 per 1,000 live. Serper and Bright Data figures cover the web searches only.
Prices and search types come from each vendor's public pricing and documentation pages; Ujeebu reliability figures come from our own probes and the AI answer figures from our AI Citation Index. Checked on . Prices change; check the vendor page before you buy.
Ujeebu publishes this page and sells one of the products on it. We do our best to keep it accurate and fair; if you see an error or a price that changed, please let us know.
Benchmarks and price tables only go so far. Run your real URLs through two or three of these APIs during their free trials and compare success rate and cost per successful page.
