What are the best SerpApi alternatives in 2026?

What Google changed in late August 2026

On August 27, 2026, the team at Autom published an analysis of a quiet change in Google Search: organic results now point at google.com/goto?url=... instead of exposing the destination URL in the HTML. The url parameter is not a base64 encoding of the target. It looks like an opaque reference to Google's own index record, and the destination is only readable from the Location header when you request the redirect. Autom reports the pattern is now consistent for logged-out and private browsing sessions, not just a slice of results.

That changes the cost of getting data, not just the difficulty. With plaintext links, one request returns a hundred result URLs you can parse offline. With goto links, every result needs a separate request back to Google before you know where it points. The same write-up notes Google has already dropped the num=100 parameter and tightened BotGuard and SearchGuard, both of which shrink how much one request returns.

The story reached the Hacker News front page this week at 451 points, which is why "will my SERP provider still work" became a live question for anyone running rank tracking, ad monitoring or an AI pipeline on scraped results. Autom says it updated its Google Search pipeline to resolve goto links by reading the Location header without following the redirect. Of the seven pricing pages checked for this article, Autom's is the only one that mentions the change at all.

What a SERP API is, and when you actually need one

A SERP API is a hosted service that runs a search query on Google, Bing or another engine and returns the results as structured JSON: organic results, ads, People Also Ask, prices, reviews. You send a query string, you get fields back. The vendor handles proxy rotation, browser rendering and the ongoing work of staying unblocked.

Not every job needs one. If you only want to know where your own domain ranks, a rank tracker such as Semrush or Ahrefs already bundles SERP data into a monthly subscription, and you get a dashboard instead of an endpoint. A raw SERP API earns its price when you want the results under your own logic: monitoring competitor ad copy, building a dataset for an AI pipeline, checking local pack placement across hundreds of postcodes, or feeding your own search index.

The seven options below bill in four different units. Two bill per search, two bill per thousand results or requests, one bills per scraped page on a marketplace, and one bills in generic scraping credits. That mismatch is where most of the bad pricing decisions happen.

SerpApi: the monthly default, and what it costs

SerpApi is the incumbent that most buyers compare against, and its pricing page is refreshingly plain. The free tier allows 250 searches per month. Starter is $25 per month for 1,000 searches with a guaranteed 200 successful searches per hour. Developer is $75 per month for 5,000 searches at 1,000 per hour. Production is $150 per month for 15,000 searches at 3,000 per hour. All plans are month to month, cancel anytime.

Do the arithmetic and Starter works out to $0.025 per search. That is the number to hold onto, because it is the floor of this comparison in reverse: the two cheapest providers below land at $0.001 per query. SerpApi is not charging 25 times more for nothing. A monthly subscription means predictable billing, no prepayment to guess at, and an API-only company that answers support tickets when an engine changes. But if your workload is bulk SERP collection rather than production rank tracking, that 25x gap is the whole decision.

Serper.dev and Autom.dev: the $0.001-per-query tier

Serper.dev skips subscriptions entirely. You buy credits as a top-up: Starter is $50 for 50,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000), Standard is $375 for 500,000 credits ($0.75 per 1,000), and Scale is $1,250 for 2.5 million credits ($0.50 per 1,000). Throughput runs 50 queries per second on Starter and 100 on Standard, and the site offers 2,500 free queries without a credit card. Two details matter at purchase time: the credits expire after 6 months, and Serper's own marketing claims rates "up to 10 times cheaper" than SerpApi and Bright Data, which holds against SerpApi's Starter tier at $0.001 versus $0.025 per search.

Autom.dev runs the same headline numbers with friendlier terms. Starter is $50 for 50,000 credits, which its estimator treats as 50,000 requests at 50 requests per second. Standard is $375 for 500,000 requests, Premium $1,250 for the top tier. Credits are valid for one year instead of six months, logs are retained for 90 days, and only successful responses that return HTTP 200 consume a credit, so failed calls are free. It charges the same one credit per call for Google, Bing, Brave and Perplexity rather than pricing engines differently. There is a 1,000-request free allowance with no card required.

If you are choosing between these two on price alone, you cannot. Pick the one whose fine print matches your usage: Autom.dev if your volume is lumpy and you want credits to survive a quiet quarter, Serper.dev if you already trust the brand or want the higher published throughput at the entry tier.

Oxylabs and Bright Data: per-result billing from proxy vendors

Both are proxy companies first, which shapes how they sell SERP data. Oxylabs prices its SERP API by successful result: the Micro plan is $49 billed monthly for up to 98,000 results, with listed rates from $0.50 per 1,000 results, Google results at $1.00 per 1,000 without JavaScript rendering and $1.35 per 1,000 with it.

Bright Data quotes its SERP API from $1 per 1,000 requests, with a free tier of 5,000 requests per month and its standard offer to match a first deposit up to $500. Note the unit switch between the two: Bright Data bills requests, Oxylabs bills successful results, so a page of Google results does not cost the same thing on both invoices even when the headline rate looks identical.

Neither is the cheapest per query here. They win when you already buy residential or datacenter IPs from the same vendor, because the SERP endpoint then rides an existing contract, an existing invoice and one support relationship instead of adding a second vendor to procurement.

Apify and ScrapingBee: actors and credits

Apify sells through a marketplace. Its Google Search Results Scraper actor is priced from $1.80 per 1,000 scraped search result pages, on top of an Apify plan: Free is $0 with $5 of monthly usage to spend in the store, Starter is $19 per month with $19 of usage, Scale is $199 per month and Business is $999 per month. The actor page lists a 4.7 rating from 219 reviews. The appeal is not the price per page, it is that you can run the same job through the API, on a schedule, or swap in a different actor without moving platforms.

ScrapingBee requires more care. Its plans read like a bargain: Hobby is $19 per month for 75,000 API credits, up to Business+ at $599 per month for 8,000,000. But credits are not searches. ScrapingBee's own documentation prices a JavaScript-rendered request at 5 credits, and a premium-proxy request at 25 credits with JavaScript enabled or 10 without. Its docs also say premium proxies are what you need when the target is a search engine. Apply the 25-credit rate and the Hobby plan covers about 3,000 search requests, not 75,000; at the 10-credit rate it covers 7,500. That 25x spread between the headline credit count and a usable search is the most misleading number in this comparison, and it is the vendor's own documentation that produces it.

Which SerpApi alternative should you pick?

• A few thousand queries a month, or a pilot: Serper.dev or Autom.dev. Neither asks for a subscription, both hand you 50,000 queries for $50, and a failed request does not cost a credit at Autom.dev.
• A production pipeline where someone must answer when Google shifts: SerpApi. You pay 25 times more per search at the entry tier, and what you buy is an API-only vendor with published throughput guarantees and documentation for more engines.
• An existing proxy contract: Oxylabs or Bright Data, so the SERP endpoint sits on an account you already run.
• Scheduled jobs inside a wider scraping stack: Apify, where the actor is a $1.80-per-1,000-pages line item on a plan you may already have.
• Scraping pages generally, with search as a side feature: ScrapingBee, as long as you redo the credit math at the premium-proxy rate before you commit.

Three catches apply to all of them. First, compare cost per 1,000 successful results, not headline price per credit: the units are inconsistent across vendors by design. Second, credits expire, after 6 months at Serper.dev and 12 at Autom.dev, so prepaying for a year of volume you do not have wastes money. Third, verify how a provider handles Google's goto redirect before you sign anything for twelve months. Autom.dev is the only vendor checked here with a public note saying its pipeline resolves those links; ask the others directly, and test with your own queries before you commit volume.

At a glance

SERP data providers: entry pricing checked on vendor pricing pages, September 12, 2026

FAQ

Is SerpApi free?

There is a free tier with 250 searches per month and no time limit stated on the pricing page. Paid plans start at $25 per month for 1,000 searches, checked on September 12, 2026. Bulk collection is usually cheaper elsewhere: Serper.dev and Autom.dev both sell 50,000 queries for $50.

Is Serper.dev cheaper than SerpApi?

Per search, yes. Serper.dev's Starter top-up is $50 for 50,000 queries, or $0.001 per query, against $0.025 per search on SerpApi's $25 Starter plan. The trade-off is shape, not just price: Serper.dev credits expire after 6 months, while SerpApi bills month to month with no prepayment.

Do SERP APIs still work after Google's goto change?

Search itself is unaffected, but destination URLs are now hidden behind a google.com/goto redirect, so a provider has to resolve the Location header to return the real link. Autom.dev documents doing exactly that. Before committing volume to any provider, test whether its responses return final destination URLs or raw goto links.

Related reading

Semrush tool profile, Ahrefs tool profile, Serpstat tool profile, ToolBistro radar index

Sources

• Autom: google.com/goto anti-scraping update (August 27, 2026)
• SerpApi pricing
• Serper.dev SERP API pricing
• Autom.dev pricing
• Oxylabs SERP API
• Bright Data SERP API
• Apify Google Search Results Scraper
• ScrapingBee pricing
• ScrapingBee documentation (credit costs)