Best SERP APIs in 2026

Scraping SERPs (search engine result pages) can be a challenging task. CAPTCHA, IP address blocks, and inconsistent results often disrupt the process. This is unfortunate because accurate SERP data helps SEO specialists optimize their content. And a lack of precise data makes it extremely hard to know whether a page is ranking as it should.

This is why SERP APIs exist. They’re tools designed to automate SERP scraping, bypass anti-bot restrictions, and provide specialists with the information they need to optimize their website for search engines.

In this article, I’ll examine the best SERP APIs, ranking them based on real-world performance tests conducted along with the Cybernews research team. Keep reading to find my top choice.

Top 5 best SERP APIs – shortlist

1. Oxylabs – best SERP API for enterprises
2. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) – most affordable SERP API
3. Bright Data – SERP API with a wide toolset
4. ScraperAPI – hassle-free SERP API
5. SerpApi – reliable SERP API for legal compliance

What is a SERP API?

A SERP API is an application programming interface that enables automated access to search engine results pages. SERP APIs are crucial for SEO specialists, as they allow them to automatically scrape search engines like Google or Bing to see how high their results rank.

Without SERP APIs, SEO data extraction would have to be done by hand. As you can imagine, for companies in industries like eCommerce, SEO specialists have to rank hundreds, or even thousands of pages. Checking the results for each would take a considerable amount of time.

That’s where SERP APIs come in, allowing specialists to quickly check the ranking pages for each keyword they’re targeting. These programs rapidly scan the search results page and convert it to a JSON format, which can then be used to create databases and analyze the results. They do so by using proxy servers to simulate a given location, bypassing CAPTCHA, and then parsing the data.

How to choose the best SERP API

The best SERP APIs offer several features that ensure they’re dependable and effective at getting reliable SERP results. Here are the top features that you should look for when choosing a SERP API:

• Data accuracy. SERP APIs need to produce accurate results, scan the pages, and rank within the results page correctly.
• Success rate. The best SERP APIs have a high success rate when scanning pages. This is important to maintain effective data collection.
• Speed and latency. Having a fast SERP API allows SEO specialists to get data quickly and react to changes accordingly.
• Geo-targeting. A wide range of proxies ensures that you can change SERP results in various locations. This can be as detailed as targeting a particular city.
• API documentation. A well-documented API helps you quickly set up the tool and ensure that it fits well in your workflow.
• CAPTCHA and anti-bot handling. A lot of search engines use CAPTCHA and other anti-bot measures. The best SERP APIs have ways to bypass these restrictions to provide reliable results.
• Scalability. While a small provider may let you handle a few requests a day, a reliable provider scales to match your SERP scraping needs.
• Pricing. SERP APIs can be priced in several ways. Finding one that has a pricing model that matches your scale and needs is crucial for scraping SERPs effectively.

Best SERP APIs in 2026 – detailed list

In order to determine the best SERP APIs, I took a look at each product’s speed, accuracy, success rate, parsing quality, and cost efficiency. Here are the results:

1. Oxylabs – enterprise-grade SERP and proxy infrastructure

Main proxy type:	Residential, datacenter
Free trial:	✅ Yes, 3 or 7 days
Support:	24/7
Price:	Starting at $49.00/month

Visit Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a top proxy provider offering a dedicated SERP and web scraper API for both enterprises and consumers. It features multiple pricing plans and scalability that will be helpful when building your SERP API setup.

During testing, I found that Oxylabs offers an excellent scraping infrastructure. This included multiple search engines, such as Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, as well as LLM/AI-based search engines. When scraping, it gave me the option of receiving either a JSON or a raw HTML file. I was also given the option to automate scraping, schedule recurring jobs, and customize the specific details of each task. With a pool of over 175 million residential, mobile, data centre, and ISP proxies and geo-targeting capabilities that can be as granular as cities or coordinates, I could easily target the scraping with great detail. These deep dives come at the cost of simplicity, with Oxylabs requiring a bit of technical expertise to get the most out of it.

In my tests, Oxylabs scored a perfect 100% score, performing 100 requests in 137 seconds. This was one of the fastest results I’ve seen during testing, and the fastest to achieve a certain 100% score.

Oxylabs offers plans starting at $49.00/month, which cover up to 98,000 requests, with request prices varying depending on the website you’re scraping. It also offers a 3-day free trial to consumers and a 7-day free trial to corporate clients.

2. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) – most affordable proxy scraping service

Main proxy type:	Residential, datacenter
Free trial:	✅ Yes, 7 days
Support:	24/7
Price:	Starting at $29.00/month

Visit Decodo

Decodo is a popular proxy provider known for its budget-friendly proxies and scraping tools. Offering over 115 million proxies in 195+ locations, its SERP APIs are excellent for users seeking value-for-money deals.

When testing Decodo, I found that it provided excellent tools for scraping search engine results. A feature I really liked was the scraping templates, which are pre-built setups for SERPs like Google and Bing. Compared to Oxylabs, this was a much simpler scraping setup, which would also be suitable for people without coding experience. However, it could struggle getting around anti-bot measures like CAPTCHA if set up incorrectly. Decodo also offers flexible geo-targeting with over 195+ locations available, and the ability to target by country, city, state, or zip code. This is an excellent tool for SEO specialists.

Decodo claims a 99.99% success guarantee. However, in my tests, it failed 7 out of 100 requests, resulting in a 93% success rate and a total time of 174 seconds. This is still a decent result, but I was surprised that I couldn't replicate the provider's guarantee during the test.

Pricing-wise, Decodo is a pretty affordable option. On its Core plans, prices start $0.32 per 1000 requests, with up to 90,000 results in total on the cheapest plan, the $29.00/month Core Plan. At higher plans, the costs can decrease to as low as $0.08 per request, but require a commitment to spending $3999.00/month on the product. If you're uncertain whether you want to commit to Decodo, the provider offers a 7-day trial for the SERP API. However, it requires a credit card to start, and the plan automatically activates after the trial period ends.

3. Bright Data – most comprehensive SERP API toolset

Main proxy type:	Residential, datacenter, ISP
Free trial:	✅ Yes, for approved customers
Support:	Live chat
Price:	Pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1000 results

Visit BrightData

Bright Data offers a wide variety of SERP API tools, allowing you to target your scraping thanks to its large proxy network of over 150 million IPs. Known mostly for its proxy solutions, Bright Data’s scrapers are also a good choice thanks to their robust toolset.

Bright Data offers a dedicated SERP API, which generates parsed JSON results for Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and the search engines of major eCommerce platforms, such as Amazon and eBay.

The APIs handle real-time monitoring, fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, IP rotation, and JavaScript rendering. That said, navigating these features can be challenging for non-technical users. To help with more advanced cases, Bright Data also offers granular geo-targeting based on country, city, zip code, ISPs, and ASN.

In my tests, Bright Data succeeded in 79 out of 100 requests, performing them the fastest among all the providers, completing them in just 46 seconds. The 21 failures resulted in a 302 HTTP code, which shows that the request was redirected to a different URL. This means that they didn't necessarily fail, and this could still be considered an impressive 100% success rate, surpassing Bright Data's advertised 98.5% effectiveness.

Bright Data offers pay-as-you-go plans at $1.50 per 1000 results with no commitment. If you're a frequent user, it also offers bundles of 380,000 results at $499.00/month, 900,000 results at $999.00/month, and 2 million results at $1999.00/month.

While Bright Data offers free trials, they're only available to pre-approved customers, requiring you to contact the provider's team before starting your trial. This is also true for their regular services, which require a strict KYC (know your customer) check before giving you access to all features.

4. ScraperAPI – best SERP API for hassle-free scraping

Main proxy type:	Residential
Free trial:	✅ Yes, 7 days
Support:	24/7
Price:	Starting at $49.00/month

Visit ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is a convenient provider focused on providing easy-to-use SERP APIs and other scraping tools. With multiple automations designed to help you quickly scrape search engine results, ScraperAPI impressed me with its ease of use.

ScraperAPI has a built-in proxy network that automatically rotates its IPs. I really appreciate this feature, as it means users don't have to manage their infrastructure manually. The API itself is also unified, with anti-bot/CAPTCHA bypass, as well as proxy routing, built into the scraping setup. It also offers parsing templates for Google and other popular SERPs, which makes setup far easier. I particularly enjoyed its Smart Routing feature, which saves money by avoiding using premium proxies when they're not needed.

Unfortunately, my testing setup didn't allow me to confirm ScraperAPI's performance claims, like its 99% success rate. This was due to the product’s incompatibility with the testing scripts set up by our research team. However, Reddit users have pointed out that it has been slow and has experienced issues with reliability in the past. Luckily, its free plan allows you to test its performance before committing.

ScraperAPI prices start at $49.00/month for 100,000 requests ($0.49 per 1000 requests). Unfortunately, the two cheapest plans are limited to scraping in the US and EU, and don't have some of the advanced features offered by ScraperAPI.

To get the full set of features, you'll need to buy at least 3,000,000 credits for $299.00/month. ScraperAPI also offers a free plan with 1000 free credits per month for small scraping projects. If you need more, the provider also offers a 7-day free trial with 5000 credits available.

5. SerpApi – legally compliant SERP scraper

Main proxy type:	Residential
Free trial:	✅ Permanent free tier with 250 searches/month
Support:	Live chat, email support
Price:	Starting at $75.00/month

Visit SerpApi

SerpApi is one of the first SERP scraping services to have hit the now-populated market. This service is pretty straightforward – it focuses on providing fast and accurate scraping data, while keeping you legally safe. Its U.S. Legal Shield feature means that the company assumes scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies, ensuring you won't have to pay restitution should somebody attempt to litigate your scraping activities.

SerpApi focuses on real-time extraction of structured data and provides the tools to do so without much hassle. It has endpoints for over 80 different search engines, including Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and Yahoo, making it easy to parse their results pages. I particularly appreciate the fact that its infrastructure is fully managed, handling proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and browser emulation, which means you won't have to run your own proxy or headless browser setup.

SerpApi claims a 99.95% success rate. However, I was unable to verify it through testing, since SerpApi's managed structure made it impossible to test using my setup. Luckily, SerpApi does provide a status page for its API, tracking its performance. At the time of writing, it holds a 99.682% success rate, significantly lowered by an apparent issue with Google services on November 21st. In contrast, other search engines did not show such dips in performance.

SerpApi offers plans starting at $75.00/month for 5,000 searches ($15.00 for 1000 searches), which is definitely on the expensive side. Additionally, its U.S. Legal Shield feature is only available on the $150.00/month production plan and above. SerpApi also offers a permanently free tier, which provides 250 searches/month.

6. Nimbleway – best for AI-powered automations

Main proxy type:	Residential
Free trial:	✅ Yes, 7 days
Support:	Live chat
Price:	Pay-as-you-go at $3.00 per 1000 requests

Visit Nimbleway

Nimbleway is a proxy provider that specializes in offering AI-powered automations within the SERP API space. This makes it an excellent choice for users who are less technically inclined and looking to automate their SERP scraping.

I really liked Nimbleway’s approach to SERP APIs. It utilizes AI prompt-based automations, featuring self-corrections and automatic scaling, to scrape search engine results pages. This is an excellent choice for non-technical users, as the algorithms handle data structuring and IP rotation, leaving you to analyze the results.

During my tests, Nimbleway successfully sent 90 out of 100 requests in 269 seconds. This was slower than its competitors, and the success rate was lower than that of the other SERP APIs I tested. Still, given Nimbleway’s automation, if you want a hassle-free scrape, it’s still a decent enough result.

Pricing-wise, Nimbleway has a pay-as-you-go model with prices starting at $3.00 per 1000 requests. This is a relatively high price. However, given the level of automation involved with each request, it’s still not the worst deal. Nimbleway also offers a 7-day free trial for its SERP API product. More advanced features, such as AI fingerprinting or template parsing, are available with prepaid packages, which can reduce the cost to as little as $1.40 per 1000 requests.

6. NetNut – best for speed and stability

Main proxy type:	ISP
Free trial:	✅ Yes, requires contacting support team
Support:	Live chat
Price:	From $85.00/month

Visit NetNut

NetNut is an established proxy provider with a wide net of ISP residential proxies that guarantee high stability when scraping data. It integrates AI into its SERP workflow, giving users express insights into its data.

NetNut offers high-stability, fast static residential IP proxy networks. Its dedicated SERP API has built-in support for major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Baidu. Once the scrape is completed, NetNut gives an AI overview of the scraped JSON data, giving users immediate insights. Its wide array of proxy servers also helps in getting detailed, geo-targeted scrapes.

Speed and reliability-wise, I wasn’t able to set up a reliable test for NetNut. Even so, the provider guarantees a 99.9%, and its ISP proxies are reported to be some of the fastest on the market. Customer opinions on TrustPilot support that notion.

The big knock on NetNut is its pricing. It doesn’t offer any pay-as-you-go options, and plans start at a hefty $85.00/month on an annual plan, covering 132,000 requests ($0.64 per 1000 requests). NetNut does offer a free trial upon contact with its support team. Unfortunately, when attempting to request one, I didn't receive a response from NetNut’s support multiple times.

Best SERP APIs compared

To help you figure out the best SERP API, I created a table breaking down the main features of each provider:

Provider	Price	Geo-targeting	Speed	Success rate	Proxy type (main)	Pool size	Free trial	Support
Oxylabs	Starting at $49.00/month, up to 98,000 requests	Deep as cities or coordinates	137 seconds for 100 requests	100%	Residential, datacenter	Over 175 million	✅ Yes, 3 or 7 days	✅ Yes, 24/7 live chat, email, with dedicated account managers
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)	Starting at $29.00/month, up to 90,000 results	Country, city, state, or zip code	174 seconds for 100 requests	93%, 7 out of 100 failed	Residential, datacenter	Over 115 million	✅ Yes, 7 days, credit card required	✅ Yes, 24/7 live chat and email support
Bright Data	$1.50 per 1000 results, pay-as-you-go	Country, city, zip code, ISPs, and ASN	46 seconds for 100 requests	79%, 21 failed, though failures were 302 redirects	Residential, datacenter, ISP	Over 150 million	✅ Yes, for pre-approved customers	✅ Yes, 24/7 live chat, email, and dedicated account managers
ScraperAPI	Starting at $49.00/month, 100,000 requests	Country targeting across 50+ locations, cheaper plans limited to the US and EU, ZIP code targeting for some sites	Not confirmed by test, claims 99%	Not confirmed by test, claims 99%	Residential	Over 40 million	✅ Yes, 7 days with 5000 credits or permanent free tier with 1000 credits	✅ Yes, 24/7 live chat and expert assistance
SerpApi	Starting at $75.00/month, 5000 searches	Precise targeting using location names, IDs, or GPS coordinates, supports country and language parameters	Not confirmed by test, claims 99.95%	99.682% from status page	Residential	Not publicly disclosed	✅ Yes, permanent free tier with 250 searches/month	✅ Yes, live chat and email support
Nimbleway	$3.00 per 1000 requests, pay-as-you-go	Country, state, and city-level targeting	269 seconds for 100 requests	90%, 10 out of 100 failed	Residential	Not publicly disclosed	✅ Yes, 7 days	✅ Yes, 24/7 via live chat, email, and multiple channels
NetNut	From $85.00/month on an annual plan	Worldwide coverage, down to city and state level	Not confirmed by test, claims 99.9%	Not confirmed by test, claims 99.9%	ISP	Over 85 million	✅ Yes, requires contacting support, response failure reported	✅ Yes, 24/7 live chat and email support

How we tested the best SERP APIs

When testing the best SERP APIs, together with the Cybernews research team, I used a set of criteria that helped me decide on how to rank each product, giving different aspects various weights depending on their importance. To do so, I used modified proxy testing criteria and methodology. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Speed and latency (20%). Scraping is a time-consuming process, so the faster you can get the results, the better. That’s why our testing focused on each provider’s ability to generate requests fast.
2. Accuracy and success rate (20%). Equally important to speed is how often the requests succeed. Our testing also confirmed whether the provider’s guarantees were accurate.
3. Price and value (20%). Price effectiveness is an important factor in web scraping. That’s why we looked at each product’s pricing, examining both their monthly costs and per- request prices.
4. Geo-targeting and endpoint coverage (15%). Scraping often needs to be done on various levels, going as deep as a city-specific search result. We examined the precision of each product’s geo-targeting setup and coverage.
5. Ease of implementation (15%). Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced coder, the easier a SERP API is to implement, the more time you can spend getting reliable results. We checked each provider’s documentation and service to see how easy they are to use and implement.
6. Support and reliability (10%). In case of trouble, it’s good to have a reliable support team you can rely on to fix any issues. We examined the support options offered by each provider to see if they’re good enough to react quickly to any performance issues.

Final thoughts

The SERP API space is filled with details. Various products cater to different niches, ranging from basic engines for beginners to advanced setups for experts. Finding the right tool depends on your scale and exact needs.

In my testing, I found that Oxylabs is the best SERP API product overall, combining a powerful API with excellent performance. The provider allows you to target your scrapes in extreme detail, while remaining relatively cheap, especially compared to some of the other providers on my list.

That said, other products, such as Decodo, may better fit your niche. That’s why it’s essential to research each product and match its features to your specific requirements before making a purchase. Luckily, all providers on my list offer either a free trial or a free plan that allows you to do just that.

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