Best SERP data APIs by published price
Two kinds of product return search results: classic SERP APIs that parse a search engine's results page into JSON, and AI-oriented search APIs built for agents. This page ranks the first kind by what each vendor publishes per 1,000 queries, and cross-links the second.
Prices checked . Prices only: we have not benchmarked success rate, speed or output quality, so treat this as a cost shortlist, not a verdict.
What this workload needs
- Structured JSON for the engines you need (Google, Bing and others differ by vendor).
- A per-search price you can predict: some vendors charge more than one credit per Google query.
- Location, device and language targeting, which we do not price here.
- Compare plan sizes: SERP plans are usually fixed monthly search quotas.
Cost shortlist
- Crawl4AI: about $99.00/month at 100,000 requests (Cloud Builder). Tends to fit: Free, self-hosted crawling for RAG. Watch-out: Self-hosting means you handle browsers, proxies and blocks. MCP: Yes.
- Bright Data: about $150/month at 100,000 requests (SERP PAYG). Tends to fit: Hard anti-bot targets at scale. Watch-out: Many products with separate pricing pages; check which one you need. MCP: Yes.
- ScraperAPI: about $299/month at 100,000 requests (Business (Google = 25 credits)). Tends to fit: Simple 'send URL, get HTML' scraping at modest volume. Watch-out: Credit cost varies by domain: Google SERP = 25 credits, bot-protected sites 11+. MCP: Yes.
- Oxylabs: about $500/month at 100,000 requests (Flexible - Google non-JS). Tends to fit: SERP + scraping + proxies under one subscription. Watch-out: Generic '/Scrape from $0.50' is a starting rate; target-specific rows differ. This site uses the conservative custom-domain rows. MCP: Yes.
The shortlist is the four lowest published-price estimates at 100,000 requests a month for serp query (structured search results). It is rule-based (cheapest first) and not influenced by affiliate status.
SERP query (structured search results): estimated monthly cost at example volumes
| Vendor | 10,000 / month | 100,000 / month | 1,000,000 / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawl4AI | $10.00 Cloud Starter | $99.00 Cloud Builder | not enough data |
| Bright Data | $15.00 SERP PAYG | $150 SERP PAYG | $1,500 SERP PAYG |
| ScraperAPI | $299 Business (Google = 25 credits) | $299 Business (Google = 25 credits) | not enough data |
| Oxylabs | $30.00 Starter - Google non-JS | $500 Flexible - Google non-JS | not enough data |
| SerpApi | $150 Production | not enough data | not enough data |
Partial or estimated, not ranked: Apify (component-only rate; see its page).
No usable published price for this request type: Firecrawl, ZenRows, Browserbase, Scrapfly, Tavily, Exa, SerpApi, Jina Reader, Zyte, ScrapingBee, Brave Search API, Hyperbrowser, Steel. They are not ranked rather than guessed.
Open the calculator with your own volume to compare all vendors side by side.
AI/agent search query: published rates
| # | Vendor | Plan / rate | Price per 1,000 | Monthly spend needed | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jina Reader | $50 pack (s.jina.ai minimum) | $0.50 per 1,000 | none | prepaid |
| 2 | Browserbase | Parallel Fast | $1.00 per 1,000 | $20/mo | payg |
| 3 | Firecrawl | Standard | $1.66 per 1,000 | $83/mo | annual |
| 4 | Exa | Instant search | $4.00 per 1,000 | none | payg |
| 5 | Brave Search API | Search | $5.00 per 1,000 | none | payg |
| 6 | Hyperbrowser | All plans | $5.00 per 1,000 | none | payg |
| 7 | Tavily | Growth | $5.00 per 1,000 | $500/mo | monthly |
How to choose
- If you need a few thousand searches a month, the monthly plan minimum dominates; look at the 10k column.
- If you need hundreds of thousands, per-1,000 rate and overage rules matter most.
- If an agent is the consumer and wants clean snippets for an LLM, an AI search API is usually the right shape; see the AI agent search page.
- Rows marked component only (for example Apify's SERP proxy) exclude Actor and compute charges and are not directly comparable.
Related comparisons
Other use-case guides
- RAG and LLM ingestion
- Ecommerce price monitoring
- JavaScript-heavy sites
- Anti-bot protected sites
- AI agent web search
- Browser automation for agents
FetchIndex has an affiliate relationship with Firecrawl; it does not change prices, rankings or caveats (disclosure). This page contains no affiliate links.