SERP API: what it is and how to pick one
A SERP API fetches a live Google results page and hands it back as clean JSON. This page covers what these APIs do, five things to check before you buy, and where the main options land, including ours.
What a SERP API does
SERP stands for search engine results page. A SERP API fetches that page from Google at scale and returns it parsed: organic results with positions, the local pack, knowledge graph, news, shopping, images, reviews. You send a query over HTTPS with an API key. You get structured data back, usually in a second or two. The proxies, the headless browsers, and the parser maintenance are the vendor's problem instead of yours.
Who runs on these: rank trackers checking positions daily, lead-gen tools pulling business lists from Google Maps, price monitors watching shopping results, research pipelines, and AI agents that need live search grounding. If your product needs Google results as data, this is the category you're shopping.
On the legal side, stated neutrally: US courts have repeatedly sided with scraping public, logged-out pages, while Google's Terms prohibit automated access that violates machine-readable instructions like robots.txt. Vendors carry that tension so buyers don't have to, and that is why this market exists as managed APIs.
One request, real JSON
The whole category works the same way: query in, parsed page out. Here's the web search call and the shape it returns:
And a call we ran live while writing this page. We asked Google autocomplete what people type after the words "serp api". Here are the ten suggestions as CSV, then the same rows as JSON below:
One thing jumps out of the data: suggestions like "login" and "careers" are brand searches. SerpApi the company named itself after the category, which makes shopping for one confusing. More on that below.
Swap type=web for maps, places, news, shopping, images, videos, scholar, patents, autocomplete, webpage, or reviews. Twelve Google surfaces, one endpoint, one key.
Five things to check before you pick
Every vendor returns Google results. The differences hide in the billing fine print and the schema. Check these five:
Per request, per result, or per successful result? The sharpest question: what happens when Google returns nothing? On most vendors an empty page still bills. At long-tail volume that quietly becomes a real line item.
Some vendors reset unused searches every month. Others expire prepaid credits after a set window. Read that clause before buying a big pack, because "unused" is the normal state of a prepaid balance.
You will write parsers against this schema and live with them. Check that the shape is stable, documented, and consistent across search types. The serper-style JSON shape has become the de facto standard, and we kept ours compatible with it on purpose.
Rank tracking needs web. Lead gen needs maps and reviews. Monitoring needs news and shopping. Count the search types on your roadmap, then check the vendor actually serves them as parsed data.
Anything over a couple of seconds hurts agents and user-facing features. Every serious vendor has a free tier. Use it: run your real queries and time them before any money moves.
The landscape
Three names come up most when devs shop this category: SerpApi, Serper, and us. All three are good at their core job, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Here's the plain version:
| SerpApi | Serper | CrustAPI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Known for | The veteran. Deep parsing, biggest catalog | Cheap, fast Google credits | Bills only on results, credits never expire |
| Engines beyond Google | Yes, many | No, Google only | No Bing or Baidu. Google plus LinkedIn public data |
| Billing model | Monthly subscription | Prepaid credits | Prepaid credits, 1 per query that returns results |
| Empty results | Billed | Billed | Free |
| Do unused credits expire? | Searches reset monthly | Yes | Never |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | 3,000 / month, no card |
| Legal cover product | Sold on bigger plans | No | No |
The prices move, so we keep receipt-backed vendor tables current instead of hardcoding them here: SerpApi vs Serper vs CrustAPI is the direct three-way, and the Serper roundup and SerpApi roundup rank ten vendors each on real per-1,000 pricing and billing quirks.
The trade-offs, since you're comparing vendors: CrustAPI is a one-person company. Dawson builds it and answers support@crustapi.com himself. That means direct answers from the person who wrote the code, and no sales calls at any pack size. It also means no compliance certifications and no enterprise account team. If your procurement process needs those, SerpApi is the safer pick, and that's fine.
Why billing on success matters
Most metered APIs charge for the attempt. The request lands, you pay, whether or not anything useful came back. That's fine for queries you already know are good. It falls apart on the work a SERP API actually gets bought for: long-tail keyword lists, lead sweeps across small towns, and agents firing exploratory queries. A real share of those come back empty.
On CrustAPI, a query that returns zero results costs zero credits. You're charged only when data comes back. Sweep 10,000 niche queries and you pay for the ones that produced something, and nothing for the dead ends.
The second half of the mechanism is time. Credits never expire. Buy a pack for one project, and whatever's left waits for the next one. No monthly reset, no use-it-or-lose-it clock.
One credit per successful query
Prepaid packs, self-serve, ex-tax: 25k for $49 · 100k for $149 · 500k for $549 · 2.5M for $1,999. That works out to $1.96 per 1,000 at entry, down to about $0.80 per 1,000 on the biggest listed pack. The free tier is 3,000 queries a month with no card, and it renews every month. Try it against your real workload in the playground or straight from the docs.
Beyond the SERP: LinkedIn public data
The same account also covers LinkedIn public data: people search, full profiles, companies, jobs, and posts, with verified emails on people results. It pairs naturally with the SERP side. Maps records carry a business's name, address, phone, website, ratings, and hours; when you need a decision maker's verified email, that comes from the LinkedIn people endpoints.
When someone else is the better pick: SerpApi if you need engines beyond Google (Bing, Baidu, and many more) or your legal team wants the liability cover they sell on bigger plans. Serper if you want the cheapest entry price for Google credits and you'll reliably burn your volume before it expires. Both are solid products run by people who know this space well.
Common questions
Clay
Test the category properly
3,000 free queries a month is enough to run your real workload against all 12 search types. Time the responses and read the JSON yourself.
Get 3,000 free credits