SERP API pricing
SERP API pricing: the cheapest SERP API and what Google Search API cost really is
The short answer
Published SERP API prices for Google results run from about $0.60 to $25 per 1,000 searches, a spread of roughly forty times for the same job. The cheapest verified rate is DataForSEO at $0.60 per 1,000 on its slow queue. Google itself is no longer an option: its Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and existing users must move off it by January 1, 2027. If the reason you are pricing calls is that you want daily keyword positions, 1,000 keywords costs roughly $18 a month in raw calls and $99 a month already built, tracked and alerting.
Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this page says so rather than estimating one.
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Every provider quotes a different unit, so nothing lines up until you convert it.
One vendor sells searches, another sells credits, a third sells a monthly subscription with a search ceiling attached. Two of them charge more for the same Google result than for an ordinary web page. The only figure that lets you compare them is the price of 1,000 successful Google SERPs, so that is the column everything below is converted into.
The spread is wider than most buyers expect. The cheapest verified rate and the most expensive verified rate differ by more than forty times, and the expensive one is not forty times better. What you are paying for at the top of the range is throughput guarantees, parsed structure across dozens of engines, legal cover and support, which is worth real money to some teams and nothing at all to others.
The finding most buyers miss
ScraperAPI states in its own pricing FAQ that a standard page costs 1 credit while Google and Bing cost 25. That turns a 100,000 credit plan into 4,000 Google searches, and a headline that looks like $0.49 per 1,000 into $12.25 per 1,000. The multiplier is real, published and easy to walk past.
| Provider and plan | Published price | Google searches included | Cost per 1,000 | The condition attached |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO, standard queue | $0.0006 per SERP | Pay as you go | $0.60 | Queue states 5 minutes on average, with a target turnaround of 45 minutes. $50 minimum deposit. |
| DataForSEO, priority queue | $0.0012 per SERP | Pay as you go | $1.20 | Up to 1 minute on average. Same $50 minimum deposit. |
| DataForSEO, Live mode | $0.002 per SERP | Pay as you go | $2.00 | Up to 6 seconds, single POST. More than three times the standard queue rate. |
| ScraperAPI Professional | $975 per month | 420,000 | $2.32 | 10,500,000 credits divided by the 25 credit Google rate. 300 concurrent threads. |
| ScraperAPI Scaling | $475 per month | 200,000 | $2.38 | 5,000,000 credits at 25 per Google search. Global geotargeting. |
| ScraperAPI Business | $299 per month | 120,000 | $2.49 | 3,000,000 credits. First tier with global geotargeting rather than US and EU only. |
| ScraperAPI Startup | $149 per month | 40,000 | $3.73 | 1,000,000 credits. Geotargeting limited to US and EU. |
| Google Custom Search JSON API | $5 per 1,000 | Up to 10,000 per day | $5.00 | Closed to new customers. Existing users must migrate by January 1, 2027. Returns a Programmable Search Engine, not google.com. |
| SerpApi Big Data | $275 per month | 30,000 | $9.17 | 6,000 guaranteed throughput per hour. Only successful searches are counted. |
| SerpApi Production | $150 per month | 15,000 | $10.00 | 3,000 per hour. Labelled most popular on the vendor page. |
| ScraperAPI Hobby | $49 per month | 4,000 | $12.25 | 100,000 credits at 25 per Google search. The cheapest door hides the worst rate. |
| SerpApi Developer | $75 per month | 5,000 | $15.00 | 1,000 per hour. Full refund within 7 days of subscribing. |
| SerpApi Starter | $25 per month | 1,000 | $25.00 | 200 per hour. The most expensive rate of any plan verified here. |
| Scrapingdog Lite | $40 per month | Not stated | Not stated | 200,000 request credits, but the credits consumed by one Google search are not published on the pricing page. |
Sorted cheapest first. Every figure was read from the provider's own pricing page on September 5, 2026. ScraperAPI rows are computed from its published 25 credit Google rate rather than quoted, because the vendor publishes credits and not searches. Scrapingdog is listed without a rate because it does not publish the credit cost of a Google request.
Google Search API cost is now a trick question.
Search for Google Search API pricing and you will still find the same answer repeated everywhere: 100 free queries a day, then $5 per 1,000, capped at 10,000 a day. Those numbers are correct and the option is gone. Google's own documentation now carries a note stating that the Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, points new projects at Vertex AI Search for up to 50 domains, and gives existing customers until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative.
There was always a second problem with it, and it caught a lot of people who budgeted around that $5 figure. The Custom Search JSON API never returned google.com web search. It queried a Programmable Search Engine that you configure yourself, so the ordering it returned was its own, not the results page a customer sees. Anyone who built ranking reports on it was reporting positions from a different index and did not always know it.
The practical consequence for a 2026 budget is simple. There is no first party Google search API to fall back on, so every provider in the table above is a third party reading the public results page. Price them against each other, and read the turnaround and multiplier conditions, because that is now the whole market.
Free tiers, exactly as published
- SerpApi
- 250 searches a month on the free plan, 50 throughput per hour.
- ScraperAPI
- 1,000 free API credits, which is 40 Google searches at the 25 credit rate. Maximum 5 concurrent connections.
- Scrapingdog
- 200 request credits, no credit card required.
- DataForSEO
- $1 credited on registration, which buys about 1,666 standard queue SERPs before the $50 minimum deposit applies.
- Google Custom Search JSON API
- 100 queries a day, but closed to new customers.
These are testing allowances, not production capacity. The largest of them covers eight days of one keyword checked daily.
The line item nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Legal exposure is now a procurement variable.
On December 19, 2025 Google sued SerpApi in federal court, arguing among other things that it circumvented Google's protections under section 1201 of the DMCA and calling the business model parasitic. Google's own post on the case accuses the company of "circumventing our security measures to take websites' content wholesale." In July 2026 the court granted SerpApi's request to dismiss the case.
Nothing here is a verdict on any provider, and litigation moves faster than any page can track, so check the current status yourself before you sign. The point for a buyer is narrower: reading a search engine's results at scale is contested ground, and the cheapest per thousand rate does not price that in. It is also the reason SerpApi publishes a U.S. Legal Shield offering up to $2 million of coverage for customers, which is a genuine differentiator no other provider verified here matches.
Price per thousand is the wrong number if the job is tracking rankings.
Most people arrive at a SERP API price list because they want to know where their keywords rank and a tracker looked expensive. The conversion is one multiplication: keywords times days. One thousand keywords checked once a day is 30,000 calls a month. Track desktop and mobile separately and it is 60,000. Add three cities and you are at 180,000 before anyone has looked at a chart.
The table below runs four realistic keyword counts through the cheapest published route at each provider, and puts the equivalent finished tracker next to them. The raw data genuinely is cheaper. That is the honest headline and it stays true at every volume.
Try it before you price it
If you are sizing a build, run five of your own keywords through the checker at the top of this page first. It is the same fixed daily check the tracker repeats, so it tells you in a minute whether the finished version answers your question.
| Keywords checked daily | Calls per month | DataForSEO standard | ScraperAPI plan needed | SerpApi plan needed | Serpstracker, already built |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 3,000 | $1.80 | Hobby $49 | Developer $75 | Starter $39 |
| 500 | 15,000 | $9.00 | Startup $149 | Production $150 | Growth $99 |
| 1,000 | 30,000 | $18.00 | Startup $149 | Big Data $275 | Growth $99 |
| 5,000 | 150,000 | $90.00 | Scaling $475 | Above Big Data, price not published | Agency $249 |
One check per keyword per day, desktop only, one location. DataForSEO figures are calls multiplied by $0.0006 and exclude the $50 minimum deposit. ScraperAPI and SerpApi columns name the smallest published plan whose allowance covers the call count. Serpstracker plan limits are 250, 1,500 and 5,000 keywords, all checked daily.
Eighteen dollars of data becomes a system somebody has to own.
A SERP API returns one results page for one request and then forgets it happened. Everything that makes ranking data useful sits after that response, and it is the part that does not appear on any pricing page. Here is the work, in the order you hit it.
1
A scheduler that actually fires
Thirty thousand calls have to leave on a cadence, spread inside a throughput ceiling, and survive your own server restarting. This is the first thing people underestimate and the first thing that silently stops.
2
Retry and failure handling
Providers count only successful searches, which means failures are yours to notice. A keyword that quietly errors for six days leaves a hole in the history exactly where you needed the evidence.
3
Location and device matrices
Every keyword needs a fixed location and device, held identical tomorrow. Vary either one and you have recorded a movement that never happened.
4
Finding yourself in the response
Your domain can appear as a subdomain, a redirect target, an AMP URL or three times on one page. Deciding which occurrence is your position is a rule you write, not a field you read.
5
A counting rule you keep
Ads, the map pack, video carousels and AI blocks all occupy space. Whether position four means the fourth blue link or the fourth thing on the page is your decision, and you have to apply it the same way every day forever.
6
Historical storage
One reading is worthless. Thirty thousand rows a month, indexed so a two year chart still loads, is a database with a retention policy and a backup.
7
Day over day diffing
Positions are only interesting as changes. Something has to compare today with yesterday, ignore noise of a place or two, and decide what counts as a real fall.
8
Alerts that reach a human
A drop nobody sees is not monitoring. Thresholds, delivery, deduplication so one bad crawl does not fire two hundred emails, and a way to mute a keyword you already know about.
9
Something a client can open
Sooner or later the person paying wants to look at it themselves, on a phone, without asking you to export anything. That is a product, and it takes longer than the pipeline did.
When the API route is the right call
Buy raw calls when the SERP is an input to something else: a dataset, a model, a research pipeline, a product feature of your own, or scale far past what any tracker sells. Buy a tracker when the output you want is a position with a date next to it and somebody told when it moves. If you want both, our own rank tracking API returns positions that have already been checked, stored and diffed, so you are pulling finished data rather than parsing search pages.
SERP API pricing questions, answered with published figures.
How much does a SERP API cost?
Published rates for Google results run from about $0.60 to $25 per 1,000 searches, a spread of roughly forty times. DataForSEO charges $0.60 per 1,000 on its standard queue, ScraperAPI works out at $2.32 to $12.25 per 1,000 once the 25 credit Google multiplier is applied, and SerpApi runs $9.17 to $25 per 1,000 depending on plan size. Read from vendor pages in September 2026.
What is the cheapest SERP API?
Of the providers verified here, DataForSEO publishes the lowest rate at $0.60 per 1,000 Google SERPs on its standard queue, with a $50 minimum deposit. That price buys the slow lane: the page states 5 minutes on average with a target turnaround of 45 minutes. Real time results through Live mode cost $2 per 1,000, which is more than three times the headline figure.
Does Google have an official search API?
Not one you can sign up for today. Google documentation states that the Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, and that existing customers have until January 1, 2027 to move to an alternative. It also never returned google.com web search: it queried a Programmable Search Engine you configure yourself, so its ordering was never the live SERP most people assumed they were buying.
Is there a free SERP API?
There are free testing allowances rather than free production access. SerpApi publishes a free plan of 250 searches a month, ScraperAPI gives 1,000 credits which is 40 Google searches at its 25 credit rate, Scrapingdog gives 200 credits, and DataForSEO credits $1 on registration. None of these carry a project past a prototype, and none of them include the storage and alerting that make ranking data worth having.
How many SERP API calls do I need to track 1,000 keywords?
Thirty thousand a month for one daily check, because you multiply keywords by days. Add a second device and it becomes 60,000, and a second location doubles it again. Sizing a plan on the keyword count instead of the call count is the most common way a SERP API budget comes in three or four times over.
Is it cheaper to build a rank tracker with a SERP API?
The data is cheaper, the system is not. At 1,000 keywords checked daily, raw results cost about $18 a month on the cheapest queue against $99 for a finished tracker. The gap closes the moment you count the scheduler, the retry logic, storage, day over day diffing, alert delivery and the engineer who fixes the parser when Google changes the layout.
What is the difference between a SERP API and a rank tracker?
A SERP API hands you one results page as JSON and forgets it. A rank tracker schedules that request, finds your domain in the response, stores the position with a date, compares it to yesterday and tells you when it moves. The API is an ingredient. The tracker is the finished thing you can show a client.
Do SERP API prices include AI Overviews?
Usually not at the base rate. SerpApi lists a separate Google AI Overview API and a Google AI Mode API among its endpoints, and DataForSEO bills its AI Summary endpoint at $0.01 per task, which is roughly seventeen times its standard SERP price. Treat AI surfaces as a separate line in the budget rather than something folded into the per thousand number.
Why is my SERP API bill higher than the advertised price?
Almost always a multiplier buried in the FAQ. ScraperAPI states plainly that a standard page costs 1 credit while Google and Bing cost 25, so a 100,000 credit plan is 4,000 Google searches. DataForSEO doubles the price for every extra 100 results when you raise the depth parameter above its default of 10. Both are published, and both are below the fold.
Which SERP API is fastest?
Of the verified turnaround figures, DataForSEO Live mode publishes up to 6 seconds for a single POST request, against up to 1 minute on its priority queue and 5 minutes on average for standard. Speed is priced accordingly: Live costs $2 per 1,000 against $0.60 for the standard queue. If nothing in your workflow is waiting on the response, you are paying three times over for latency you do not use.
Do SERP APIs charge for failed requests?
The good ones do not, and they say so. SerpApi states that only successful searches count and that cached, errored and failed searches are not billed. ScraperAPI and Scrapingdog both publish the same rule. Check it before you commit, because a provider that bills failures makes its own reliability your budget problem.
Can I use a SERP API for client ranking reports?
You can, but the API is the smallest part of the job. Client reports need per client separation, a location per keyword, history that survives a schema change and access the client can use without you. Agencies that price this properly usually find a per client tracker subscription lands under what one engineer costs to maintain the pipeline.
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