SerpAPI
Search engine results API that provides structured JSON data from Google, Bing, YouTube, and 100+ other search engines without managing proxies or browsers.
Use Cases
Free Tier
250 searches/month, 50 requests/hour, access to all search engines, no credit card required
How to Maximize the Free Tier
SerpAPI's 250 free searches/month is best used for prototyping SERP-based features or light monitoring. Cache results aggressively — the same query shouldn't be re-fetched within the same day unless data freshness is critical. Prioritize Google and YouTube endpoints since they provide the most value. For production, the Starter plan ($25/month for 1,000 searches) is cost-effective at $0.025/search. Watch the 50 requests/hour limit carefully when building batch crawlers.
Getting Started
Sign up at serpapi.com → get API key from dashboard → install SDK (pip install google-search-results or npm install google-search-results) → choose search engine endpoint → make API call with query parameter → parse structured JSON response.
Pros
- Engine coverage: Supports 100+ search engines including Google, Bing, YouTube, Baidu, Walmart, and Apple App Store from a single API
- Structured output: Returns clean, parsed JSON with organic results, knowledge graphs, featured snippets, and related questions — no HTML scraping needed
- Pay-per-success: Only successful searches are billed — failed requests and errors don't count against your quota
Cons
- Low free tier: 250 searches/month is only viable for prototyping and small side projects, not production workloads
- Rate limiting: 50 requests/hour cap on free tier can bottleneck batch data collection tasks
- Google dependency: Google results may be blocked or rate-limited more aggressively than other engines due to scraping detection