If you're building an SEO tool, AI agent, search application, rank tracker, research product, or data pipeline, you eventually run into the same problem:
How do I get reliable search results without maintaining my own scraping infrastructure?
SerpAPI is one of the best-known solutions, but it isn't the only option.
There are now several APIs that approach search differently:
- DataForSEO
- Apify
- Serper
- Scrapingdog
- Tavily
- Serpent API
- Exa
The important thing is that these aren't all solving exactly the same problem.
Some are traditional SERP APIs.
Some are scraping platforms.
Some are SEO data platforms.
And some are designed specifically for AI agents and semantic web search.
This guide compares them from a developer's perspective, including pricing, free usage, scaling, billing model, search-engine coverage, concurrency, SERP features, and the type of application each API is best suited for.
Pricing and feature information in this article was checked in October 2026. Provider pricing and limits can change, so verify the provider's pricing page before making a purchasing decision.
TL;DR
If you don't want to read the entire comparison:
| Provider | Best for | Pricing approach | Free tier | Multi-engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | Enterprise SEO/data pipelines | Pay-as-you-go | $1 credit + sandbox | Yes |
| Apify | Custom scraping & automation | Platform + usage | $5 usage | Actor-dependent |
| Serper | Simple Google Search API | Prepaid credits | 2,500 queries | No |
| Scrapingdog | High-volume scraping/SERP | Monthly credits | 200 credits | Multiple APIs |
| Tavily | AI agents & web research | Credit-based PAYGO | 1,000 credits/month | Web search |
| Serpent API | Low-cost SERP + multi-engine search | Deposit/PAYGO | 10 shared calls | 5 engines |
| Exa | AI-native semantic search | PAYGO | $10/month + signup credits | Web index |
For a traditional SERP application, I'd shortlist Serpent API, DataForSEO, Serper, and Scrapingdog.
For an AI agent or research product, I'd look first at Tavily and Exa.
For custom scraping infrastructure, Apify is in its own category.
1. What Makes a Good SERP API?
Before comparing prices, there are several things developers should look at.
The cheapest API isn't necessarily the cheapest API for your application.
I would evaluate at least these:
1. Price per request
How much does one successful search actually cost?
2. Billing model
Is it:
- Monthly subscription?
- Prepaid credits?
- Pay-as-you-go?
- Compute-based?
- Credit-based?
3. Free tier
Can you prototype without entering a credit card?
4. Search-engine coverage
Does the API support:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave
- Other engines?
5. SERP depth
Can you request 10, 50, or 100 results?
6. SERP features
Can you retrieve:
- Organic results
- Ads
- People Also Ask
- Featured snippets
- AI Overviews
- Local results
- Images
- Videos
- Shopping
7. Geographic targeting
Can you request results for a specific country, language, or location?
8. Rate limits
How many requests can your application send per second?
9. Response consistency
Does the JSON structure stay predictable across engines and requests?
10. Latency
How quickly do you get the response?
These factors become much more important once your application moves beyond a prototype.
2. Quick Pricing Comparison
Here's the high-level pricing picture.
| Provider | Entry pricing | Higher-volume pricing | Free usage | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | $0.60 / 1K SERPs | $0.60 / 1K Standard | $1 credit | PAYGO |
| Apify | Free | $0.13/CU Business + Actor costs | $5 usage | Platform + usage |
| Serper | $1.00 / 1K | $0.30 / 1K | 2,500 queries | Prepaid |
| Scrapingdog | $40 / 200K | ~$0.067 / 1K at 3M | 200 credits | Monthly |
| Tavily | $0.008 / credit | Custom plans | 1,000 credits/month | PAYGO |
| Serpent API | $0.60 / 1K | $0.03 / 1K at Scale | 10 shared calls | PAYGO |
| Exa | $7 / 1K Search | Custom Enterprise | $10/month + signup credits | PAYGO |
One important warning:
These prices are not perfectly apples-to-apples.
DataForSEO bills based on SERP/result depth and method.
Apify combines Actor and compute costs.
Tavily uses API credits.
Exa charges according to its search/research products.
So don't simply sort this table by the lowest number.
3. DataForSEO
DataForSEO is much more than a simple Google search API.
It's an SEO data platform designed for applications that need large amounts of structured search and SEO data.
Its SERP API supports search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Seznam, alongside other SEO-related APIs.
Pricing
DataForSEO currently publishes:
- Standard: $0.0006 per SERP
- Priority: $0.0012 per SERP
- Live: $0.002 per SERP
That works out to:
- $0.60 / 1K Standard SERPs
- $1.20 / 1K Priority SERPs
- $2.00 / 1K Live SERPs
The important detail is that a SERP represents a set of search results, and pricing can increase with depth and certain parameters.
Why developers choose DataForSEO
DataForSEO becomes interesting when you're building something like:
SEO platform
↓
Rank tracking
↓
Keyword database
↓
Backlinks
↓
SERP data
↓
Competitor analysis
↓
Technical SEO
Instead of stitching together several providers, you can build around a broader SEO data ecosystem.
Best for
Enterprise SEO products and large data pipelines.
Potential downside
If you only need:
GET keyword
→
return Google results
DataForSEO can be more infrastructure than you actually need.
4. Apify
Apify is fundamentally different from the other APIs on this list.
It's a scraping and automation platform.
Instead of buying one SERP endpoint, you can run different Actors that perform different tasks.
That means you can build workflows such as:
Search Google
↓
Extract results
↓
Visit websites
↓
Extract content
↓
Store dataset
↓
Run another Actor
This flexibility is extremely powerful.
Pricing
Apify has:
- Free
- Starter — $19/month
- Scale — $199/month
- Business — $999/month
- Enterprise
Compute pricing decreases as you move up the plans.
Business currently lists $0.13 per compute unit.
The free plan includes $5 of usage.
Best feature
Flexibility.
You aren't limited to one API endpoint.
You can build or rent Actors for:
- Amazon
- YouTube
- social platforms
- websites
- data extraction
- browser automation
- custom scraping
Best for
Developers who need scraping infrastructure rather than simply a SERP API.
Potential downside
Your final cost can be more complicated because you may have:
- Actor costs
- compute
- proxy usage
- storage
- data transfer
So comparing Apify's compute price directly against a SERP API's "per 1,000 searches" price isn't meaningful.
5. Serper
Serper takes the opposite approach.
It's extremely focused.
The core product is a Google Search API.
Its pitch is essentially:
Query
↓
Google
↓
Structured JSON
Current pricing
Serper currently offers:
| Plan | Price | Credits | Effective price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $50 | 50K | $1.00 / 1K |
| Standard | $375 | 500K | $0.75 / 1K |
| Scale | $1,250 | 2.5M | $0.50 / 1K |
| Ultimate | $3,750 | 12.5M | $0.30 / 1K |
There's also a free allowance of 2,500 queries.
The highest published tier supports up to 300 queries per second.
Serper says typical response times are around 1–2 seconds.
Why developers like it
The API is simple.
If your application only needs Google Search, you don't necessarily want a giant SEO platform.
You want:
{
"search": "...",
"results": [...]
}
Best for
Simple Google Search integrations.
Potential downside
If you need multiple search engines, Serper isn't as compelling as a multi-engine provider.
6. Scrapingdog
Scrapingdog focuses on scraping APIs and high-volume usage.
The pricing model is subscription-based, with increasingly large monthly credit allocations.
Current plans include:
- Free — 200 credits
- Lite — $40/month for 200K credits
- Standard — $90/month for 1M credits
- Pro — $200/month for 3M credits
- Premium — $350/month for 6M credits
- Business — $500/month for 9M credits
The platform continues into much larger enterprise tiers.
Interesting calculation
The Pro plan is:
$200 / 3,000,000 credits
≈ $0.067 per 1,000 credits
It also provides 100 concurrent requests at the Pro tier.
Higher plans continue increasing concurrency and monthly request volume.
Features
Scrapingdog provides APIs for areas including:
- Search
- Google SERP
- Amazon
- YouTube
- News
- Maps
- social platforms
- AI-related search features
It also provides geotargeting.
Best for
Developers who want a conventional scraping/SERP provider with large monthly quotas.
Potential downside
Unlike pure PAYGO providers, you are committing to a monthly credit plan.
If your traffic is unpredictable, that can matter.
7. Tavily
Tavily is where this comparison starts moving into a different category.
Tavily isn't primarily trying to reproduce a Google SERP.
It's designed for AI applications and agents.
A typical Tavily workflow looks like:
User question
↓
AI agent
↓
Tavily search
↓
Web sources
↓
Content extraction
↓
LLM
↓
Answer + citations
Pricing
Tavily currently offers:
- Free — 1,000 API credits/month
- PAYGO — $0.008/credit
- Project plans
- Enterprise
The free plan doesn't require a credit card.
Different API operations consume different amounts of credits.
Best for
- AI agents
- Research assistants
- Chatbots
- RAG
- Web research
- Citation-based answers
Not ideal for
Traditional rank tracking.
If you need:
keyword = "best football API"
position = 7
domain = example.com
a traditional SERP API is generally a better abstraction.
8. Serpent API
Serpent API takes a more traditional SERP approach while also supporting multiple search engines and AI-related search capabilities.
It supports:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave
The API provides a consistent JSON structure across the supported engines.
Pricing
The published SERP pricing is:
| Tier | Price |
|---|---|
| Default | $0.60 / 1K |
| Growth | $0.06 / 1K |
| Scale | $0.03 / 1K |
The Growth and Scale prices are unlocked through account balance/deposit tiers rather than a recurring monthly subscription.
That distinction is important.
You're not necessarily paying:
$500 every month
to get the Scale rate.
Instead, the balance determines the pricing tier.
Free tier
New accounts receive a shared lifetime pool of:
10 free calls
The pool can be used across the provider's supported APIs.
Search engines
Serpent supports:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave
SERP features
Depending on the endpoint, you can retrieve:
- Organic results
- Ads
- People Also Ask
- Featured snippets
- AI Overviews
- Knowledge panels
- Local results
- Videos
- Shopping
- Related searches
The Deep Search endpoint can request up to 100 results.
Interesting developer feature
Serpent also exposes pixel-position data for supported Deep Search requests.
That means a SERP result can contain information about where an element appears vertically on the rendered page.
That's useful for:
- Above-the-fold analysis
- SERP layout analysis
- Share-of-voice calculations
- SEO visibility analysis
Best for
Developers who want inexpensive traditional SERP infrastructure with multi-engine support.
9. Exa
Exa is another provider that shouldn't be treated as a simple SerpAPI clone.
It's designed around AI-native search.
The idea is closer to:
AI agent
↓
Search web
↓
Retrieve relevant sources
↓
Extract content
↓
Reason
↓
Produce answer
Pricing
Exa currently lists Search at:
$7 / 1K requests
Other products include:
- Contents — $1 / 1K pages
- Deep Search — $12 / 1K
- Deep Reasoning Search — $15 / 1K
- Answer — $5 / 1K
- Monitors — $15 / 1K
Exa also has an Agent product with pricing based on compute and tool usage.
Free tier
The free tier includes:
- $10 credits every month
- $20 signup credits
- 10 Search QPS
No payment method is required for the free tier.
Best for
- AI agents
- Research systems
- Semantic search
- Company research
- People search
- Coding agents
- Deep research
Potential downside
If you only need traditional Google ranking data, Exa is substantially more expensive than a dedicated SERP API.
10. Search Engine Comparison
Here's another way to look at the market.
| Provider | Bing | Yahoo | DuckDuckGo | Brave | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Apify | Actor | Actor | Actor | Actor | Actor |
| Serper | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Scrapingdog | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Tavily | Web index | Web index | Web index | Web index | Web index |
| Serpent API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Exa | Web index | Web index | Web index | Web index | Web index |
This is one of Serpent's strongest differentiators if your application needs to compare search engines.
11. SERP Feature Comparison
If you're building an SEO product, search-engine support isn't enough.
You also need the actual SERP features.
| Feature | DataForSEO | Apify | Serper | Scrapingdog | Tavily | Serpent | Exa |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic results | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Web results | ✓ | Web results |
| Ads | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ | — |
| PAA | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ | — |
| Featured snippets | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ | — |
| AI Overview | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ | — |
| News | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Images | ✓ | Actor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Videos | ✓ | Actor | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Maps | ✓ | Actor | — | ✓ | — | ✓ | — |
The important distinction is that Tavily and Exa are web-search systems rather than traditional Google SERP reconstruction APIs.
That makes them excellent for AI applications but not necessarily the best choice for rank tracking.
12. What Does 1 Million Searches Cost?
This is one of the most useful ways to think about pricing.
Assuming the published entry/scale rates can be applied directly:
| Provider | Approx. cost for 1M units |
|---|---|
| Serpent API — Scale | $30 |
| Scrapingdog — Pro | ~$67 |
| Scrapingdog — Standard | $90 |
| DataForSEO — Standard | ~$600 |
| Serper — Ultimate | ~$300* |
| Tavily | Depends on credit consumption |
| Exa Search | ~$7,000 |
| Apify | Depends on Actor + compute |
*Serper's $0.30/1K rate is attached to its 12.5M-credit Ultimate pack, so you aren't simply purchasing exactly 1M credits at that rate.
This is why advertised "per 1,000" prices need context.
The cheapest nominal unit price may require buying a much larger package.
13. Subscription vs PAYGO
This is another major difference.
Subscription-based
Scrapingdog is primarily monthly:
$40/month
$90/month
$200/month
...
This is predictable if your usage is stable.
But it can be inefficient if your usage changes significantly month to month.
Prepaid
Serper uses prepaid credits.
You purchase credits and consume them.
PAYGO
DataForSEO, Tavily, Exa and Serpent all provide usage-based models, although their units and pricing structures differ.
This can be attractive for:
- startups
- prototypes
- variable traffic
- serverless applications
- applications with seasonal workloads
14. Which One Should You Choose?
There isn't one winner for every use case.
Choose DataForSEO if...
You are building a serious SEO platform.
You need:
- rankings
- keywords
- backlinks
- SERP data
- technical SEO
- advertising data
- large-scale SEO datasets
DataForSEO is more of an SEO infrastructure platform than a simple search endpoint.
Choose Apify if...
Your problem is bigger than SERP.
For example:
Search Google
→ open 100 websites
→ scrape product information
→ extract prices
→ save dataset
→ run analysis
Apify's Actor ecosystem makes this type of workflow much easier.
Choose Serper if...
You just want Google Search.
It's hard to beat the simplicity:
query
→ Google
→ JSON
And the published pricing is straightforward.
Choose Scrapingdog if...
You want:
- high monthly request volumes
- scraping APIs
- SERP APIs
- geotargeting
- increasing concurrency
- predictable monthly billing
It's particularly interesting for production scraping applications.
Choose Tavily if...
You're building an AI agent.
For example:
User:
"Research the top competitors in this market."
AI Agent:
→ Tavily
→ Search
→ Extract
→ Reason
→ Cite sources
That's exactly the kind of workflow Tavily is designed around.
Choose Serpent API if...
You need traditional SERP data but want:
- low cost
- multiple search engines
- simple JSON
- usage-based pricing
- SERP features
- AI Overview data
- high-volume search
- no mandatory monthly subscription
The multi-engine support is especially useful if your application needs to compare Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Brave.
Choose Exa if...
You're building an AI-native search or research system.
Exa makes more sense for:
AI agent
→ semantic search
→ content retrieval
→ research
→ reasoning
rather than:
keyword
→ Google rank
→ position 13
15. The Real Takeaway
There isn't really one "best SerpAPI alternative."
There are different categories.
Traditional SERP
Serpent API
Serper
Scrapingdog
These are the closest choices when your application needs actual search-result data.
SEO infrastructure
DataForSEO
Better when search results are only one part of a much larger SEO application.
Scraping infrastructure
Apify
Better when you want to build custom scraping workflows.
AI web search
Tavily
Exa
Better when your application is an AI agent that needs web research and source retrieval.
Final Comparison
| Provider | Best use case | Pricing style | Free tier | Scale | Multi-engine | AI-native |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | SEO platforms | PAYGO | $1 credit | Excellent | Excellent | Medium |
| Apify | Scraping automation | Usage + platform | $5 usage | Excellent | Actor-dependent | Medium |
| Serper | Google Search | Prepaid | 2,500 | Excellent | No | Medium |
| Scrapingdog | High-volume scraping | Monthly | 200 | Excellent | Good | Medium |
| Tavily | AI agents | Credits | 1K/month | Excellent | Web index | Excellent |
| Serpent API | SERP + multi-engine | PAYGO | 10 calls | Excellent | 5 engines | Strong |
| Exa | AI search/research | PAYGO | $10/month + signup credits | Excellent | Web index | Excellent |
My shortlist
For a traditional SERP API:
- Serpent API
- DataForSEO
- Serper
- Scrapingdog
For AI search:
- Exa
- Tavily
For custom scraping:
- Apify
The biggest mistake when comparing these APIs is looking only at the price per 1,000 requests.
For developers, the better question is:
What exactly does one request buy me, and how does the cost behave when my application reaches 100K, 1M, or 10M requests?
That's where the differences between these seven providers become much clearer.
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