SERP API pricing in 2026: 1,000 Google searches on 10 APIs

We build SerpKite, one of the ten APIs on this page, so read our picks with that in mind. Every price below links to a public pricing page we checked between October 25 and 29, 2026. We measured latency for SerpKite only; for the other nine we quote the vendor or a third-party test and say which.

A rank tracker pulling a million keywords a month and an AI agent making 2,000 searches a day pay different prices on the same API, and the cheapest list price often loses once you count expiring credits and paid failures. For one pick per use case, see Best SERP APIs in 2026.

Quick answer

If Google's own results don't matter for your use case, skip to APIs with their own index.

Price per 1,000 Google searches

Prices are list prices for a Google web search of 10 results, in US dollars per 1,000 searches, from each vendor's pricing page on October 25, 2026, with Oxylabs, Decodo, Brave and Scrapingdog rechecked on October 29.

Oxylabs prices Google without JavaScript rendering; with rendering it starts at $1.35. Decodo folded its SERP scraper into a Web Data API priced per crawl ($49 a month for up to 65,000 crawls), so we left it out of the per-search table. DataForSEO's two numbers are its Standard queue (results in about five minutes) and Live mode (seconds). SerpKite's $0.80 and $0.60 come from the $50 Growth and $300 Pro packs; the $10 Starter pack works out to $1.00.

Divide by 1,000 and you get the price of a single search: SerpApi's 100k tier is $0.00725 per call, Scrapingdog's best is $0.000136.

Billing rules that change the bill

Two APIs with the same list price can send you different invoices. Check four rules before you compare totals.

Credit expiry. Say you buy Serper's $50 pack for 50,000 searches and your agent uses 20,000 in six months. You lose the other 30,000, so you paid $2.50 per 1k for what you used. On a monthly plan that resets, every unused search is lost at the end of the month. SerpKite and DataForSEO don't expire credits, so a pack bought in a busy month keeps working through a quiet one.

Failed and empty searches. SerpApi, SearchApi and Scrapingdog don't charge for failed requests. SerpKite refunds failed searches and empty ones, including a 200 response with no organic results. Firecrawl charges for a page that answers 403 or 404, and Perplexity's Search API charges for a successful response with no results. The other vendors don't publish a rule; ask them before you sign up, because an agent that searches rare entities hits empty pages often.

Depth. On September 14, 2025, Google stopped honoring &num=100, so the top 100 now takes ten requests. Per-page vendors charge 10× for it. Serper charges 2 credits for 11–100 results. SerpKite charges 7 credits for num=100, or 3.5 in the batch lane. We wrote up the math in num=100 is gone.

Async discounts. DataForSEO's Standard queue and SerpKite's batch lane both trade a few minutes of waiting for a lower price: $0.60 against $2.00 on DataForSEO, half price on SerpKite. A nightly rank-tracking job can wait.

Speed

Treat vendor numbers as claims to test. Latency depends on the country, the query and the time of day, so run your own queries from your own region (script below).

Output for LLM agents

If an LLM reads the results, the format costs money twice: once for the search and again for the tokens. On a sample of 60 queries we measured a median of 1,139 tokens for a full JSON results page and 723 for compact output. JSON vs Markdown SERPs has the method.

Google also changed result links in 2026: many now go through a /goto redirect. A rank tracker or agent that stores the raw link records Google's URL, not the site. SerpKite and SerpApi return the resolved destination; check the others with a few queries before you build on them. Background: Google /goto links.

The ten APIs in short

SerpKite. Google web search and its verticals (news, images, maps, shopping, scholar and more), AI assistant answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode) and page extraction, with JSON or Markdown output, MCP and SDKs for TypeScript, Python and Go. Pick it for agents and for teams that buy credits in bursts. Skip it if you need a legal shield or SOC 2 today; we offer neither yet.

Serper. Fast, cheap JSON for Google web, images, news and places. Pick it for prototypes and steady traffic under 100k a month. Watch the six-month expiry on larger packs.

Scrapingdog. The lowest top-tier list price we found. Pick it for high-volume jobs where a few seconds per call is fine.

HasData. $0.35 per 1k at volume with 1,000 free searches a month. A good second vendor for failover.

DataForSEO. The rank-tracking workhorse, with dozens of SEO endpoints beyond SERPs. Pick the Standard queue for nightly jobs; Live mode costs more than three times as much.

Oxylabs. A proxy company with a scraper API on top; the $0.50 tier needs an Enterprise contract from $2,500 a month. Pick it if you already buy its proxies and want one invoice. Decodo fits the same profile with per-crawl pricing.

Bright Data. A big proxy network, 5,000 free requests a month and a higher per-search price than the SERP specialists.

SearchApi. Many engines beyond Google, pay-per-success billing and a $2M legal shield. The price drops to $1.00 only at high volume.

SerpApi. The oldest and broadest: dozens of engines, 11 SDKs, a $2M legal shield and an SOC 2 report. You pay for it: $7.25 per 1k at 100k a month.

Not Google: APIs with their own index

These APIs run their own index or an unnamed upstream. Results differ from Google's, which is fine for many agent tasks and wrong for SEO work or anything that has to match what a person sees on google.com.

Test before you commit

Fifty of your own queries tell you more than any comparison page, ours included. The script below runs a query list against an API, then prints p50, p95 and how many responses came back empty. Swap the request function to test another vendor.

QUERIES = [line.strip() for line in open("queries.txt") if line.strip()]

def serpkite(q):
    r = requests.get(
        "https://api.serpkite.com/v1/search",
        params={"q": q, "country": "us"},
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SERPKITE_API_KEY']}"},
        timeout=30,
    )
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json().get("results", [])

def run(search):
    times, empty, errors = [], 0, 0
    for q in QUERIES:
        t = time.perf_counter()
        try:
            results = search(q)
        except Exception:
            errors += 1
            continue
        times.append(time.perf_counter() - t)
        empty += not results
    times.sort()
    p95 = times[int(len(times) * 0.95) - 1] if times else 0
    print(f"p50 {statistics.median(times):.2f}s  p95 {p95:.2f}s  empty {empty}  errors {errors}")

run(serpkite)

Pick queries from your real workload: brand names, long-tail questions, local searches in the countries you sell to. Compare the top five links against a manual search, and count the empty responses, because some vendors bill them.

Where SerpKite loses Scrapingdog and Serper list lower prices at volume. DataForSEO's Standard queue matches our best price with a longer track record. SerpApi and SearchApi offer a $2M legal shield and SerpApi has SOC 2; we have neither. We launched in 2026, so you get less history to judge us by.

FAQ

Is there a free SERP API? Every vendor above has a free tier. For recurring free searches: SerpKite gives 1,000 a month to verified accounts, HasData 1,000, Bright Data 5,000 and SerpApi 250. Serper's 2,500 come once. Google's own Custom Search JSON API gives 100 a day, but it no longer accepts new customers and shuts down on January 1, 2027 (what to do).

Which SERP API is cheapest? On list price, Scrapingdog ($0.136 per 1k at its top tier) and Serper ($0.30 on its largest pack). Your effective price also depends on expiry and on whether failed and empty searches count.

Do I need Google results, or will Brave or Tavily do? Use Google results when you need to match what users see on google.com: SEO, rank tracking, brand monitoring, local and shopping data. Use an independent index when relevance matters more than Google parity and the price per 1k fits.

See all vendor rows side by side on our comparison pages, or try SerpKite in the playground without a card.

Drafted with AI assistance; the SerpKite team checked every price against the linked vendor pages. Originally published at serpkite.com.