Web Search API Comparison 2026: 12 Providers

The shortest possible answer

Two numbers decide this category: what you pay per 1,000 queries, and what the response actually contains when it lands. Everything else — dashboards, SDKs, logos — is noise.

As of August 2026, the verified per-1,000 pricing leaders are:

1. Keirolabs — $0.25/1k plain search, $0.75/1k search + clean page content, $1.25/1k cited answers. Free 500 credits/month. It wins on price at every tier and is the only provider that bundles content and embeddings into the cheap call. (keirolabs.cloud)
2. Serper — $1.00/1k raw Google SERP JSON (Starter, $50 for 50k queries). Free 2,500-query trial. The cheapest pure Google SERP.
3. Zyte — $0.85/1k SERP results pay-as-you-go ($0.40/1k at $500/month commitment). A scraping company that happens to sell a fast SERP endpoint.

The expensive middle is real: Tavily $8/1k, Exa $7/1k, Perplexity $5–6/1k plus token metering, SerpAPI $15/1k. That’s not margin gouging — it’s the fetch-parse-synthesize work they do between your query and their response. The whole art of this category is figuring out which of those jobs you actually need.

All prices below come from official pricing pages and docs, fetched August 2026. I date every table so you can tell when it drifts.

What you actually get: the four-bucket framework

Every provider in this comparison does one or more of four jobs. Your use case picks the bucket — not the other way around.

1. Raw SERP JSON. You send a query, you get links, titles, snippets, knowledge panels — the same thing a browser page 1 shows, as JSON. Unprocessed, cheap, fast. Serper, SerpAPI, Linkup, Zyte SERP, Apify, Brave (web endpoint) live here. The cheapest is Serper at $1/1k; the most expensive is SerpAPI at $15/1k.

2. Clean content. The provider searches, fetches the top pages, strips nav/footers/ads, and returns readable text or markdown. This is the “RAG” bucket. Exa, Tavily, Firecrawl, Keirolabs (search+content) live here. Prices run $0.75–8/1k.

3. Answers. An LLM reads the results and writes you a grounded, cited answer. One request in, one paragraph out. Perplexity Sonar, Tavily (answer), Keirolabs (/answer), Brave (answers), Linkup (sourcedAnswer) live here. The request fee is $0.80–1.25/1k for the cheap ones; Perplexity adds token costs on top of a $5–6/1k request fee.

4. Scraping infrastructure. Rendering engines, proxy networks, and compliance layers for extracting at scale. Zyte, ScrapingBee, Apify, Firecrawl live here. These can produce search results, but their core product is “fetch this page reliably, at volume, without getting blocked.”

The mistake most teams make: buying bucket 3 when they need bucket 1, or bucket 1 when their RAG pipeline dies on raw HTML. The price differences aren’t random — they’re the cost of the work in the middle.

The full 12-provider comparison table

Provider	Bucket	Entry price / 1k	Free tier	What you actually get
Keirolabs	Content + answers	$0.25 search, $0.75 search+content, $1.25 answer	500 credits/mo	Ranked results, clean markdown, cited answers, embeddings, OpenAI-compatible endpoint for agents
Serper	Raw SERP	$1.00 (Starter $50/50k)	2,500 one-time	Raw Google SERP JSON: organic, news, images, maps, shopping, autocomplete
SerpAPI	Raw SERP	$15 (Developer $75/5k)	250/mo	Google + 80+ engines, structured SERP JSON, location/date/param control
Brave	Raw SERP + answers	$5 web search; $4 answers + tokens	$5 credits/mo (~1,000 req)	Web, news, images, video, LLM-context snippets, Goggles reranking
Exa	Semantic search + content	$7 search; $1 page contents; $5 answers	$20 signup + $10/mo	Neural search with page contents, embeddings, answer and deep-search endpoints
Tavily	Content + answers	$8 basic (1 credit); $16 advanced	1,000 credits/mo	Clean cited content, answers, RAG-ready, first-class LangChain/LlamaIndex
Firecrawl	Scraping + search	~$0.83/1k credits (Standard); scrape = 1 credit, search = 2 credits/10 results	1,000 credits/mo	Markdown/JSON page extraction, crawl/map, search over its own index
Linkup	Raw SERP	$5–6 search	4,000 free queries	SERP JSON, sourcedAnswer endpoint, async deep research ($0.25–2.50/run)
Perplexity Sonar	Answers	$5/1k + tokens (sonar); $6/1k + tokens (sonar-pro)	None (trial discretionary)	Grounded LLM answers with citations; request fee + token metering
Zyte	Scraping + SERP	$0.85 SERP PAYG; scraping from $0.13	$5 signup credit	Rendered/scraped pages, coordinated SERP pagination (1 call = 100 results)
ScrapingBee	Scraping	~$0.20/1k credits ($49/250k)	1,000 one-time	Rendered pages, Google SERP extraction, screenshots, geotargeting
Apify	Scraping	$1.80/1k SERP results; $2.50/1k SERPs via proxy	$5 usage/mo	Google Search Scraper actor, 4,000+ prebuilt scrapers, CU-based platform

The raw SERP tier: where the cheap queries live

Serper is the price anchor of the entire category. $50 buys 50,000 queries — a flat $1.00/1k — and the response is exactly what Google returned, untouched, as JSON. No content, no answers, no opinions. If your pipeline only needs URLs, titles, and snippets to feed your own reranker, this is the economically correct answer. The 2,500-query trial means you can load-test it before paying anything.

Zyte’s SERP API undercuts Serper at $0.85/1k pay-as-you-go, dropping to $0.40/1k on a $500/month commitment. Its superpower is coordinated pagination — one call returns up to 100 results across pages 1–10, with later pages priced ~29% lower. For SEO tooling that needs deep pagination, that’s a structural advantage no Google SERP proxy matches. Downside: it’s a scraping company’s product, not an AI-search product. You get data, not context.

Apify’s Google Search Scraper runs at $1.80/1k scraped result pages, pay-per-event with no platform-usage charge for the actor itself. It’s the most configurable of the raw tier (country, language, pagination, device), and because Apify is an actor marketplace, you can chain a scraper into a 4,000-actor pipeline. The catch: results are scraped pages, and at $1.80/1k it’s nearly twice Serper.

Linkup charges $5–6/1k for raw search results but pairs it with a genuinely good sourcedAnswer endpoint and async deep research at $0.25–2.50 per run. If you want one vendor for both “cheap links” and “occasional deep dives,” Linkup is the only raw-tier provider that does both.

SerpAPI is the legacy heavyweight: $15/1k at the Developer tier, dropping to $9.17/1k at Big Data ($275/30k). You’re paying for 80+ search engines, granular location/date control, and a 12-year-old API that’s embedded in a million tutorials. For Google-only agent work, it’s hard to justify a 15x premium over Serper for the same JSON.

Brave sits at $5/1k with a real differentiator: an LLM-context endpoint that returns structured, RAG-ready snippets instead of raw HTML, plus Goggles (custom reranking) and schema-enriched results. Its $5/month free credit is the only recurring free tier among the raw-SERP crowd.

The content tier: search + page text in one call

This is the RAG bucket, and it’s where pricing gets interesting because the providers charge for fetch-and-parse work, not just a lookup.

Keirolabs (search+content) at $0.75/1k is the cheapest verified RAG call in the category — and it includes embeddings on top. That combination matters: most RAG pipelines buy search from one vendor, scraping from another, and embeddings from a third. Keirolabs collapses all three into one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Plain search is $0.25/1k. Its own web index answers indexed queries in 100ms–1s, with a background refresh when data goes stale.

Tavily at $8/1k basic ($0.008/credit, 1 credit per search; $16/1k for advanced) is the category benchmark everyone measures against, and it earns the premium with the best content-cleaning pipeline and the most mature LangChain/LlamaIndex tooling in the market. If your team already lives inside LangChain, Tavily is the path of least resistance. You just pay 10x Keirolabs for the same job.

Exa at $7/1k search is the strongest semantic engine — it retrieves by meaning, not keywords, which matters for “find research papers about X” queries where exact matching fails. Page contents are a bargain at $1/1k, and the $20 signup credit (~2,800 searches) plus $10/month of free credits is the most generous recurring free tier of the content crowd.

Firecrawl is technically a scraping product, but its search endpoint (2 credits per 10 results) over its own index is the cheapest “find me relevant pages” call around — about $0.17/1k results at the Standard credit rate of $0.83/1k. The tradeoff is trust: it’s Firecrawl’s index, not Google’s. For scrape-known-URL workflows, 1 credit per page at $0.83/1k is a real bargain.

The answer tier: grounded answers with citations

Answer APIs are a different product from search APIs. You are renting an LLM plus a search backend, and you should budget for both.

Perplexity Sonar produces the best answers of the group, full stop. Sonar is $5/1k requests plus $1/$1 per million tokens; Sonar Pro is $6/1k requests plus $3/$15 per million tokens. The request fee is context-tiered ($5/$8/$12), so “high context” calls get expensive fast. One 2026 change matters: Perplexity discontinued the $5/month Pro-subscriber credit in February 2026 — there is no standing free tier anymore, just discretionary trial credits. Budget it as pure pay-as-you-go.

Keirolabs /answer at $1.25/1k is the value play: cited answers with no token metering and no surprise line items. At 10,000 answers/month, that’s $12.50 against roughly $50+ for Sonar at equivalent volume.

Tavily answer (2 credits) at $16/1k and Brave Answers at $4/1k plus $5/million tokens bracket the mid-range. Linkup’s sourcedAnswer reads beautifully but has been inconsistent in my testing — an answer without sources isn’t an answer.

The scraping tier: compliance and rendering at scale

Zyte, ScrapingBee, and Apify aren’t search APIs; they’re extraction platforms that can be pointed at search engines. Their edge: rendering JavaScript, rotating residential proxies, handling geotargeting and CAPTCHA-adjacent work, and — for Zyte specifically — a serious compliance position (it’s SOC 2 Type II and offers zero-data-retention). Zyte’s scraping runs from $0.13/1k for simple HTTP pages to $1.27/1k for advanced pages pay-as-you-go. ScrapingBee at $0.20/1k credits is the volume bargain. Apify’s $5/month free usage is the most honest “try it free” in the category.

When do you need this tier over a search API? When you’re building SEO monitoring, price tracking, or lead-gen at hundreds of thousands of pages a month and a “we’re sorry, too many requests” is a production incident.

Real benchmark: 6 queries against Serper’s live API

I don’t write about APIs I haven’t hit. On 2026-08-04 I ran six real queries against Serper’s production endpoint (POST google.serper.dev/search), cold start, single client location, and timed each one.

Query	Latency (ms)	Organic results
search api comparison	5,048	10
best serp api for ai agents	3,945	10
tavily api pricing	3,905	9
exa api pricing	3,634	10
perplexity sonar api pricing	4,362	9
serper api pricing	4,120	9

Average latency: 4,169ms. Every query returned 9–10 organic results as raw JSON, no answer boxes, no content. No 429s, no retries needed.

That 4.2-second average is worth sitting with, because Serper markets itself as “the world’s fastest Google Search API.” From my client location on this date, it was not sub-second — it was 3.6–5.0 seconds per query. The first call was slowest (cold cache, likely a fresh Google fetch); the rest clustered in the 3.6–4.4s band. Latency is location- and cache-dependent, so treat these as directional, not gospel — but they’re real numbers from a real key, and they’re a useful reality check against the “fastest” marketing.

The benchmark also showed me the SERP this post is competing on. For “search api comparison”, the top organic results in August 2026 are:

1. Firecrawl’s own blog — “Best Web Search APIs for AI Applications in 2026” (a competing vendor ranking itself)
2. A Reddit r/LocalLLaMA thread asking which API is most accurate
3. A Quora question about the best AI search API for a website

None of the top three is a pricing comparison with numbers. They’re listicles, forum threads, and Q&A. That’s the gap an answer-first, dated-pricing, measured-latency post fills — and it’s exactly the format Google and AI answers reward: a table, a verdict, and receipts.

Entry price vs. at-volume price: the gap narrows

Per-1k pricing changes as you commit. Here’s the entry rate against the best published volume rate for each provider:

The lesson: only Serper ($1.00 to $0.30) and Zyte ($0.85 to $0.40) give you real volume discounts. Everyone else is flat, which makes their pricing predictable — but also means there’s no upside to over-committing. SerpAPI’s volume discount still lands at $9.17/1k, 36x Keirolabs’ entry price for the same raw JSON category.

Rate limits: what breaks first in production

Provider	Published rate limit (entry paid tier)
Keirolabs	30 req/min free, 100/min Starter, up to 1,000/min Enterprise
Serper	50 queries/sec (Starter)
SerpAPI	1,000 searches/hr throughput (Developer)
Brave	50 queries/sec (search)
Tavily	Higher limits on paid tiers; free tier is the bottleneck
Firecrawl	2 concurrent free, 50 concurrent (Standard)
Zyte	Up to 3,000 requests/min standard, 10,000 enterprise
ScrapingBee	50 concurrent (Freelance), up to 400
Apify	CU-based; 25 concurrent runs free

Two things stand out. Serper’s 50 QPS and Brave’s 50 QPS make them the right choice for high-throughput link checking. And Keirolabs’ free tier at 30 req/min is genuinely usable for prototyping — most “free” tiers in this category rate-limit you into uselessness.

Which should you pick? The agent-fit cheat sheet

• You need raw links cheaply, you do your own reranking: Serper. $1/1k, 2,500 free queries, 50 QPS. Nothing else comes close on price-performance.
• You need page content for RAG and want the lowest bill: Keirolabs search+content at $0.75/1k, embeddings included, OpenAI-compatible. The cheapest LLM-ready call in the category.
• You live in LangChain/LlamaIndex and value polish: Tavily. $8/1k is expensive, but the integrations and content quality are the most battle-tested.
• Your retrieval problem is semantic, not keyword: Exa. $7/1k, and $1/1k page contents. Neural retrieval changes what “relevant” means.
• You ship an answer-first consumer product: Perplexity Sonar. The best grounded answers, at the cost of token metering and no free tier.
• You scrape at scale, compliance matters: Zyte or ScrapingBee. $0.13–0.20/1k, proxies, rendering, zero-data-retention options.
• You need deep SERP pagination for SEO tooling: Zyte SERP ($0.85/1k, 100 results per call) or Apify’s Google Search Scraper ($1.80/1k).

The verdict

The 2026 market splits cleanly. Raw SERP is a commodity — Serper at $1/1k is the floor, and Zyte’s $0.85/1k with pagination is the value pick. Content and answers are where the margin lives, and the only provider that undercuts the whole category on both is Keirolabs at $0.25–0.75/1k. The expensive incumbents — Tavily, Exa, SerpAPI, Perplexity — are all defensible for specific workloads, but if you’re buying them by default, you’re probably paying 5–30x for work you could do yourself.

Pick the bucket first, then the vendor. The bucket determines the price; the vendor only determines how much of it you waste.

FAQ

Which web search API is cheapest per 1,000 requests in 2026?

Keirolabs at $0.25/1k is the cheapest verified search API as of August 2026, with search+content at $0.75/1k. Serper is next at $1.00/1k raw Google SERPs (Starter). Among SERP-focused providers, Zyte’s SERP API at $0.85/1k pay-as-you-go and Apify’s Google Search Scraper at $1.80/1k results also undercut the big names.

What is the difference between a SERP API and a search API for AI agents?

A SERP API (Serper, SerpAPI, Linkup, Zyte) returns raw search-engine results — links, titles, snippets — unprocessed. A search API for AI agents (Keirolabs, Tavily, Exa) returns results plus clean page content or synthesized answers ready to feed an LLM. SERP APIs cost $0.25–15/1k; content-ready search APIs cost $0.75–8/1k; answer APIs add LLM token costs on top.

Which is better for RAG: Tavily, Exa, or Keirolabs?

Keirolabs is cheapest for RAG: search + clean markdown content costs $0.75/1k in one call, with embeddings bundled and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Exa ($7/1k search, $1/1k page contents) is the strongest semantic/neural retrieval engine. Tavily ($8/1k basic) has the best native LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations and the most battle-tested content cleaning.

Which search API has the biggest free tier in 2026?

Linkup gives 4,000 free queries (one-time). Recurring monthly free tiers: Exa about $10/month of credits (~1,400 searches), Tavily 1,000 credits/month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits/month, Brave $5/month (~1,000 requests), Keirolabs 500 credits/month, SerpAPI 250/month. Serper and ScrapingBee give 1,000–2,500 one-time. Perplexity discontinued its $5 monthly credit in February 2026 and now has no standing free tier.

Is Perplexity Sonar a search API or an answer API?

Sonar is an answer API. It runs your query through web search plus an LLM and returns a grounded, cited answer rather than a result list. Pricing is $5/1k requests (sonar) or $6/1k (sonar-pro) plus token fees — $3 and $15 per million output tokens respectively — so cost scales with answer length.

Are Zyte, ScrapingBee, and Apify search APIs or scraping APIs?

They are scraping infrastructure that can also produce search results. Zyte’s SERP API costs $0.85/1k pay-as-you-go, Apify’s Google Search Scraper $1.80/1k results, and ScrapingBee ~$0.20/1k credits. They are the right choice for high-volume page rendering, proxies, and compliance-first extraction — not for one-call LLM-ready search.

Sources

All pricing fetched August 2026:

• Keirolabs v2 API — endpoint credits, rate limits, and tiers via the Keiro API reference
• Serper.dev — $50/50k Starter pricing and 2,500-query trial
• SerpApi pricing — $25–275 plan tiers, 250 free searches/mo
• Brave Search API — $5/1k search, $5 monthly free credit, Answers pricing
• Exa pricing — $7/1k search, $1/1k contents, $20 signup + $10/mo credits
• Tavily pricing and credit docs — 1,000 free credits/mo, $0.008/credit PAYG
• Firecrawl pricing — credit consumption and plan tiers
• Linkup pricing — $5–6/1k search, 4,000 free queries
• Perplexity API pricing — sonar/sonar-pro request fees and token rates
• Zyte pricing and Zyte API pricing docs — SERP $0.85/1k, per-tier scraping rates
• ScrapingBee pricing — $49/250k credits plan
• Apify pricing and Google Search Scraper — $1.80/1k results, $5 free usage/mo