Serper sells Google SERPs at $1 per 1,000 — AI-native search APIs run $5–$7.50, and the two lanes solve different problems

Asked:

“Could you compile a table of overview of comparison of web-search api providers?”

Eleven web-search API providers, compared from their own official pricing and product pages, researched 6 September 2026. Five are AI-ready or native-retrieval APIs that return ranked web material for agents and RAG (Brave, Exa, Perplexity, Tavily, You.com); six are SERP-extraction specialists that reproduce results from engines such as Google — usually the better fit for SEO, localization, maps, shopping and rank tracking (SerpApi, Serper, SearchApi, VALUE SERP, Zenserp, serpstack). The two groups are not interchangeable.

The comparison matrix

Badges: recurring free allowance renews monthly · signup credit one-time or capped credits · no free tier stated on the extracted page. Hover a card to focus it.

Listed price per 1,000 search calls

US dollars, entry plan, as listed on each pricing page. Directional only — request definitions and credit models differ. SearchApi, Zenserp and VALUE SERP omit a comparable per-call figure.

Findings

The cheapest listed search call in the set is Serper at $1 per 1,000 Google SERP calls, sold as prepaid credits valid for six months — serper.dev

Brave and Tavily are the only AI-lane providers with a recurring monthly sandbox: $5 in credits and 1,000 credits respectively, renewed every month — api-dashboard.search.brave.com, docs.tavily.com

You.com hands out the largest trial in the set — $100 in complimentary credits — but live-crawled page content adds $1 per 1,000 pages on top of $5/1,000 search calls — docs.you.com

SearchApi's extracted pricing page exposes no dollar figure, only an operational cap: at most 20% of a plan's credits may be spent per hour — searchapi.io

Decision guide

Independent index and privacy, broad result types — Brave

Neural/semantic retrieval plus page contents — Exa

Agent-ready search/crawl with a recurring sandbox — Tavily

Search plus optional live-crawled Markdown/HTML — You.com

Simple raw search with filtering — Perplexity

Low-cost Google SERPs — Serper

Maximum multi-engine breadth and legal/compliance cover — SerpApi

SEO rank tracking and Google verticals — SearchApi

Detailed table

Provider / product	Category	Entry pricing	Free trial / tier	Results / content format	Distinctive strengths	Important caveat	Best suited for

Pricing caveat: request definitions, result counts, content-fetch fees, credit models, taxes, rate limits and enterprise terms differ across providers, so any normalized per-1,000 price is directional rather than a full cost-of-ownership calculation. Prices and plans can change; check each linked page before committing.

Comparison of 11 web-search API providers from 48 official pages on 11 independent hosts, researched 2026-09-06. One consolidated row per provider; where duplicate pages conflicted the dedicated current pricing page was preferred, and unexposed paid figures are marked “Not extracted”. Prices are listed entry prices in USD, not negotiated or enterprise rates; evidence excerpts were cut for space.

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