About Serper
Serper is a hosted search results API. A developer sends a query and receives Google results as structured JSON, which avoids scraping search pages directly. It is aimed at developers building applications and AI agents that need current search data, and the vendor says responses typically arrive in one to two seconds.
The API covers several Google result types: plain web search plus image, news, map, place, video, shopping, scholarly and patent results, along with autocomplete. A sample response on the homepage shows fields such as a knowledge graph block and a list of organic results with titles, links, snippets and sitelinks. A language and region selector is available in the interactive demo.
Serper is a commercial service where new accounts can try it without a credit card. The homepage advertises 2,500 free queries and a starting price of $0.30 per 1,000 queries, and the site asks visitors whether to accept cookies. There is no self-hosted version described.
Key features
- Google web search results as JSON
- Image, news and video search endpoints
- Maps, places and shopping results
- Scholar and patents search
- Autocomplete suggestions endpoint
- Knowledge graph and organic result data
Good fit for
- →Giving AI agents access to current web results
- →Tracking search rankings for SEO
- →Powering search features in an app
- Tags
- serp-api
- google-search
- search-api
- web-search
- ai-agents
- seo
- developer-tools
Serper: questions and answers
- What is Serper used for?
- Serper is an API that returns Google search results as structured JSON for developers and AI agents, covering web, images, news, maps, shopping, scholar and more. It is a good fit for giving AI agents access to current web results, tracking search rankings for SEO and powering search features in an app.
- How much does Serper cost?
- Serper is a paid product with no free plan. Homepage offers 2,500 free queries with no credit card, with paid usage advertised from $0.30 per 1,000 queries.
- Is Serper open source?
- No. Serper is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Serper include Wigolo, OpenSERP and SearXNG.
- What are some alternatives to Serper?
- Serper competes with SerpApi, Tavily and Exa. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Serper alternatives.
Open-source alternatives to Serper
See all
Wigolo
Search
The go-to web for your AI coding agent — local-first search, fetch, crawl & research over
OSSvs Tavily★ 5.4k
OpenSERP
Search
Self-hosted SERP API for AI, SEO & automation. Browser-rendered Google, Bing, Yandex, Baid
MITvs SerpApi★ 1.4k
SearXNG
Search
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search
AGPL-3.0vs DuckDuckGo★ 38k
XERJ
Search
XERJ is the new way for AI to search data. Its autoindex capability activates agents to kn
Apache-2.0vs Elastic★ 2.6kuBlacklist
Search
Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
MIT★ 6.7k
Elasticsearch
Search
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
OSSvs Algolia★ 78k
SaaS alternatives to Serper
See all
SerpApi
Search
API that returns structured results from Google and other search engines
SaaS
Tavily
Search
Web search and content extraction API for AI agents
SaaS
Exa
Search
Search API that returns web pages by meaning, built for AI applications
SaaS
Brave Search API
Search
Independent web index exposed through a paid search API
SaaS
Jina AI
Search
Search foundation APIs for embeddings, reranking and web content reading
SaaS
Parallel
Search
Web search and research APIs built for AI agents
SaaS

