Scrapeless is a Google Search API built as a direct SerpApi alternative. SerpApi's published plans work out between $9.17 and $25 per 1,000 searches. Scrapeless Google Search API starts at $1 per 1,000 successful requests and falls below $0.50 on volume tiers.
Same structured JSON. Same organic results, knowledge graph, local pack and pagination. Sub-second responses, no hourly throughput ceiling, and AI Overview in a single call instead of a second billable request.
Cost per 1,000 searches, at list price
Each SerpApi plan against the Scrapeless base rate. Lower is better.
vs SerpApi Starter
1,000 / movs SerpApi Developer
5,000 / movs SerpApi Production
15,000 / movs SerpApi Big Data
30,000 / moBased on SerpApi’s published plans (Oct 2026). Scrapeless starts at $1/1,000 successful requests, with volume discounts. Check current pricing before purchase.
SerpApi sells a fixed monthly bucket of searches. Scrapeless bills per successful request. Lining the two up at SerpApi's own plan volumes is the clearest way to see the gap — and the gap widens, not narrows, as you grow.
| Monthly volume | Scrapeless at $1/1K | SerpApi plan | SerpApi cost | SerpApi per 1K | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $1.00 | Starter | $25.00 | $25.00 | 25×less |
| 5,000 | $5.00 | Developer | $75.00 | $15.00 | 15×less |
| 15,000 | $15.00 | Production | $150.00 | $10.00 | 10×less |
| 30,000 | $30.00 | Big Data | $275.00 | $9.17 | 9×less |
| 250,000 | Under $125 | Enterprise — contact sales | Not published | Not published | volume tier |
SerpApi plan prices and included volumes as published on serpapi.com, October 2026; cost per 1,000 is those two figures divided. Scrapeless list rate is $1 per 1,000 successful requests, dropping below $0.50 per 1,000 on qualifying volume plans — the 250,000 row uses that volume rate. Requests that return shopping data are billed at twice the base rate. Both vendors change pricing; confirm current rates before you commit.
Run the numbers on your own volume. The free trial takes a minute to start and needs no card.
Price gets a team to look. What keeps them is that the ceiling comes off their throughput and AI Overview stops costing a second request.
A fixed monthly allowance means you pay for the searches you forecast. Scrapeless charges for the ones that actually return data — a failed request is retried at our cost and does not appear on your invoice.
SerpApi's plans are rated by throughput per hour, from 50 on Free to 6,000 on Big Data. A rank-tracking run that needs 20,000 keywords before 9am has to be spread across the clock or upgraded into. Scrapeless sells concurrency, not an hourly cap.
SerpApi documents AI Overview as a follow-up request using an ai_overview.page_token that expires within a minute of the original search, when the block is not already inline. Scrapeless exposes a dedicated actor that returns the answer, its citations and its shopping block directly.
Vendor claims are easy to write. These are figures from our own runs — dates, sample sizes and the caveats included, so you can judge them rather than take them. Every number below is reproducible on both free tiers.
Scrapeless posted the lowest average, p50 and p95 of all seven APIs in this run (p50 1.981s). SerpApi also returned 10 of 10 usable requests, so this is a speed difference rather than a reliability one. These were long-sentence queries, which are harder than typical short keywords — the published sub-second figure refers to standard queries, and this run is the harder end of the range.
800 web-search requests each, US English · Scrapeless vs Oxylabs
Disclosed in full: Oxylabs returned an internal status 613 on 82 of its 800 requests in this run. That anomaly is part of why the gap is this wide, and we show it rather than leaving it out. This is one configuration on one day — it does not establish that Scrapeless is more reliable across every market, account and setup.
Requests with usable organic results, of 800
Usable-request latency — P50
Usable-request latency — P95
Beyond response speed, we measure the depth and completeness of search results — from organic result coverage and raw HTML retrieval to snippet field availability.
92 / 0
Walking start=0..90 returned 92 organic result items across ten consecutive pages with no empty page. Same run: SerpApi 88, SearchAPI.io 87.
99.5%
In the volume run, 99.5% of returned organic result items carried a snippet field. This is field coverage, not snippet accuracy.
1,818 KB
Fetching metadata.rawUrl as a second request returned roughly 1,818 KB of original HTML, and the document-structure check passed.
Understand how the benchmarks were conducted, what the metrics mean, and the limitations behind the results.
seven SERP APIs against the same 10 US-English long-sentence queries, 10 usable requests each. A ten-query sample is small — treat it as indicative, not definitive.
800 web-search requests per vendor, US English. Figures are for usable requests only.
These are our own tests on our own accounts. Both free tiers are open, so the honest check is your keyword list, your markets, timed on your side.
The 92 figure counts organic result items, not 92 unique destination websites.
Raw HTML needs a second call to metadata.rawUrl. It is not returned inline with the first response.
99.5% is field coverage — the share of result items carrying a snippet — not a measure of whether the snippet text is correct.
A single num=100 request returned HTTP 400 in the same testing; the ten-page walk above is the method that worked.
Seven countries returned organic results, but some responses did not confirm region or language — that is coverage, not geo-targeting accuracy.
Both free tiers are open — run your keyword list through each and time it yourself.
Set the comparison aside for a moment. This is what the Scrapeless Google Search API gives you as a product — the reasons teams stay after the migration, not just the reason they arrive.
A flat, published base rate that drops below $0.50 per 1,000 on volume tiers. No seat fees, no per-engine surcharge, and the price is on the site rather than behind a sales call.
Typical response time is under 1 second, which is what makes a daily — or hourly — tracking cadence practical rather than something you batch overnight and read tomorrow.
Billing counts successful requests only. A request that fails is retried at our cost and never reaches your invoice, so your effective cost per usable row is the number you were quoted.
Shape any request by country, language, location and device with gl, hl, google_domain and a proxy country — the same call, pointed at whichever market you need.
Organic results, knowledge graph, local pack and map, latest posts, pagination and search metadata arrive as typed JSON — and AI Overview comes back as Markdown you can hand straight to a model.
Concurrency-based metering with dedicated concurrency on volume plans, a free trial with no credit card, and a named solutions engineer once you are running production workloads.
Where the two services genuinely differ, and where they do the same job. Everything in the SerpApi column comes from its own public pricing and documentation pages.
| Feature | Scrapeless Google Search API | SerpApi |
|---|---|---|
| List price per 1,000 | $1.00, under $0.50 on volume tiers | $9.17 – $25.00 depending on plan |
| Billing model | Per successful request — failures retried at our cost | Prepaid monthly bucket of searches |
| Free allowance | Yes Free trial, no credit card required | Yes 250 searches / month |
| Throughput model | Concurrency-based, dedicated concurrency on volume plans | Searches per hour, 50 → 6,000 by plan |
| Published response timeStandard queries | Under 1 second | Not published |
| Measured response timeour Long query benchmark | 2.168 s average, p50 1.981s, p95 3.190s — lowest of the seven APIs tested | 6.093s average, p95 13.365s — 10/10 usable |
| Measured result depth10-page walk, 0..90 | 92 organic result items, zero empty pages | 88 organic result items |
| Organic results | Yes position, title, link, redirect_link, favicon, snippet, snippet_highlighted_words, source | Yes Structured JSON |
| Knowledge graph, local pack, pagination | Yes knowledge_graph, local_results, local_map, pagination | Yes |
| Google AI Overview | One call Dedicated scraper.overview actor returning Markdown, source[], products[] | Two-step Follow-up request with a page_token that expires within 1 minute, when not returned inline |
| Geo & language targeting | Yes gl, hl, google_domain, proxy country | Yes |
| Breadth of non-Google engines | Focused Deep on Google surfaces; other sources via Web Unlocker and Agent Browser | Yes Many search engines beyond Google |
| U.S. Legal Shield | Not offered Evaluate against your own compliance requirements | Listed On every published plan |
| Uptime commitment | Available on enterprise agreements — ask during onboarding | SLAs of up to 99.97% cited under premium support |
SerpApi pricing and API details compiled from public sources, October 2026. Response times and result counts are from the long-sentence benchmark
Four steps from signing up to a scheduled production job. No SDK is required — the API is one HTTP endpoint, so curl is enough to see your first result.
Sign up with no credit card and you land in the dashboard with a usable key. The free trial is there so you can run your real keyword list before deciding anything. Try for Free →
Find it under API Key in the dashboard. Every request carries it as an x-api-token header — there is no OAuth dance and no key in the query string. API reference →
POST to /api/v1/scraper/request with the actor scraper.google.search and your query in input. A 200 hands back the parsed JSON directly; a 201 returns a taskId to poll for longer jobs. Quickstart →
Vary gl, hl and google_domain to cover each market, page with start and num, and call scraper.overview when you also need the AI Overview answer. Then put it on a cron and watch the cost per run. Product page →
# 1 — organic results for one market
curl 'https://api.scrapeless.com/api/v1/scraper/request' \
--header 'x-api-token: YOUR_KEY' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
"actor": "scraper.google.search",
"input": {
"q": "best running shoes",
"hl": "en",
"gl": "us",
"google_domain": "google.com",
"start": 0,
"num": 20
}
}'
# → organic_results[], knowledge_graph,
# local_results, pagination, search_information
# 2 — the AI Overview answer, same key
curl 'https://api.scrapeless.com/api/v2/scraper/execute' \
--header 'x-api-token: YOUR_KEY' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
"actor": "scraper.overview",
"input": { "prompt": "best running shoes",
"country": "us" }
}'
# → content (Markdown), source[], products[]Full parameter list, response schemas, language examples and the pricing calculator.
Both services take a query and hand back structured JSON, so a migration is a request rewrite and a field remap — not a re-architecture. Here is the same search on each side.
What changes in your code: the HTTP method becomes POST, api_key in the query string becomes an x-api-token header, and your search parameters move inside an input object under "actor": "scraper.google.search".
What does not change: q, hl, gl, google_domain, start and num keep their names and meanings, and the response is still a JSON object keyed by result type — so most parsers need a rename, not a rewrite. A 200 carries the data directly; a 201 returns a taskId to poll.
Get a key, point one job at the new endpoint, and keep the old one running alongside it.
One published rate that falls with volume. No prepaid pack, no seat fees, no per-engine surcharge — and you are billed only for requests that actually return data.
Run your own keyword list through the real API before you decide anything.
The published base rate, charged per successful request rather than a monthly bucket you have to forecast.
Rates drop below half the base price on qualifying volume plans, with capacity and support to match.
Not sure which tier you land in? Start on the free trial, run a week of your real workload, and we will quote from the usage rather than a guess.
· In every plan ·
Requests that return shopping data are billed at twice the base rate. Volume pricing depends on committed monthly volume — see the pricing page for current tiers, or for a quote against your actual query mix.
The cost difference changes what is affordable. Daily rank tracking across every market, or an AI-visibility sweep on every brand term, stops being a budget conversation.
Daily positions across keywords, domains and markets at a cadence the price finally allows.
Local results and map placement per city, at the granularity multi-location brands actually need.
Whether your brand appears in the AI answer, which sources it cites, and how that shifts week to week.
Shopping surfaces, competitor listings and demand signals pulled straight from the SERP.
Verify PPC and Ads visibility, placement and competitive messaging across target queries and markets.
The complete scenario library.
Start free without a credit card, point your existing rank-tracking job at one endpoint, and check the response against what you are paying for today.