SerpAPI

REST API that returns structured JSON from Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and other search engines without managing headless browsers.

Evaluated Mar 06, 2026 (0d ago) vcurrent

Homepage ↗ Developer Tools search google serp scraping data api

⚙ Agent Friendliness

/ 100

Can an agent use this?

🔒 Security

/ 100

Is it safe for agents?

⚡ Reliability

/ 100

Does it work consistently?

Score Breakdown

⚙ Agent Friendliness

MCP Quality

Documentation

Error Messages

Auth Simplicity

Rate Limits

🔒 Security

TLS Enforcement

100

Auth Strength

Scope Granularity

Dep. Hygiene

Secret Handling

API key in query string is visible in server logs — use header instead; no scope restrictions

⚡ Reliability

Uptime/SLA

Version Stability

Breaking Changes

Error Recovery

Best When

Programmatically accessing structured Google search data without managing Puppeteer or avoiding detection.

Avoid When

You only need web search results for AI agents — Tavily or Brave Search offer AI-optimized cheaper alternatives.

Use Cases

• Search Google for company names and extract organic results for competitive intelligence
• Fetch Google Shopping results to monitor competitor pricing for e-commerce agents
• Retrieve Google Knowledge Graph data for entity enrichment in research pipelines
• Monitor keyword rankings by querying Google search results for specific queries on schedule
• Extract YouTube search results and video metadata for content research workflows

Not For

• High-volume searches at scale — costs add up quickly at $0.002-0.005 per search
• Real-time news feeds — use a dedicated news API instead
• Searches requiring authenticated user context (logged-in Google results)

Interface

REST API

Yes

GraphQL

gRPC

MCP Server

SDK

Yes

Webhooks

Authentication

Methods: api_key

OAuth: No Scopes: No

api_key query parameter or x-api-key header; one global key per account

Pricing

Model: usage_based

Free tier: Yes

Requires CC: No

Search credits do not roll over; different engines have different costs

Agent Metadata

Pagination

offset

Idempotent

Full

Retry Guidance

Not documented

Known Gotchas

⚠ Each search engine (Google, Bing, YouTube) uses different parameter schemas — check engine-specific docs
⚠ Google search results vary by gl (country) and hl (language) parameters — omitting these gives US English results
⚠ Searches deduct from quota even if result is empty (no organic results) — budget accordingly
⚠ async parameter enables polling for heavy queries — polling interval should be ≥1 second to avoid wasted calls
⚠ num parameter (results per page) max is 100 but increasing it costs more searches per call on some plans

Alternatives

tavily-search serper-api brave-search google-custom-search

Full Evaluation Report

Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for SerpAPI.

$99

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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.