SERP APIs That Can Beat Google at Their Own Game

Image Licensed from Shutterstock

As an SEO expert, you know the importance of data. And as a web scraper, you know the importance of speed. So why not combine the two and use a powerful Google search API to do all the heavy lifting for you? In this blog post, I’ll introduce you to five different APIs and SERP scrapers that can help you scrape huge amounts of data from Google faster and more efficiently. Keep reading to learn more!

What Are Google Search APIs Good for?

Generally speaking, SERP (Search Engine Results Page) APIs enable you to scrape SERP data in real-time, for any keyword, and on any search engine domain. This means you can gain insights into consumer trends and competitor activity (both organic and paid).

Buyer journeys begin with search engines, dominated heavily by Google, which is why firms in the digital commerce industry and service providers are collecting Google search signals to identify real-time changes.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Let’s say your company is in the food delivery business, competing in a major city market. Since the covid-19 breakout in 2020, this industry has exploded and is still becoming increasingly profitable. All businesses in the food industry generate many crucial data points such as:

• images
• reviews
• locations
• prices
• special offers

Most of which can be found on Google SERPs. Any service trying to gain a competitive edge and improve its product must have all of the updated and relevant restaurant data integrated into its database to be able to optimize its offering based on consumer trends and more. Now, in a major city market, the amount of such SERP data is enormous, and collecting all of it automatically is not simple as you may think.

Image Licensed from Shutterstock

Another relevant example is eCommerce. Companies in this industry must continuously optimize their product listings as well as improve their SEO to appear on top of SERP and also attract the relevant potential buyers searching for their product categories.

This requires collecting data from Google SERP for both paid and organic keyword research, often diving into GEO-specific keywords and learning about ranking trends. This includes both Google shopping as well as Amazon/Bing product ads and more.

Why Is It Difficult to Extract Accurate Data at Scale from Google SERP?

Ironically enough, Google does not want you to crawl its search engine results pages. That is very funny considering the fact it has built its information empire using crawler bots that feed the data into Google’s notorious ranking algorithms that decide the fate of large enterprise and small business websites alike.

Google SERPs are loaded with sensitive bot detection which is based on various indicators such as the number of requests sent from a single IP, information in your browser’s header, and more.

Facing Google’s anti-bot mechanisms on your own is quite a challenge. Triggering them will immediately result in a CAPTCHA which will halt your automated scraper. Moreover, if you continuously attempt scraping the data through the same IP address, it can be blocked.

Another reason is, that since Google’s 2017 search update, performing manual data collection through it is nearly impossible. It will require you to:

• Sign out of any Gmail accounts and Chrome profiles.
• Delete cookies and clear history.
• Change your GEO location via proxy or VPN to the country you’re targeting. In both cases, if you’re using a browser extension, Google will most likely detect you are using data center IPs.
• Open a new tab or browser window for every new search and then aggregate all the data you extract hoping it doesn’t get messed up.

Image Courtesy of Bright Data Blog

This is where Google SERP APIs come into play, helping you collect all the data you require into a structured dataset, without having to worry about getting blocked or forcing you to time your data collection manually and slowly (large scraping jobs from Google might take whole days and even weeks doing it that way).

The 5 Most Useful Google Search APIs

If you made it this far in the article, then you might want to learn about the Google SERP scrapers that will help you move forward, so we will soon get to our rankings and detailed features of each service. Sadly, the marketing teams of the below services did quite a poor job branding these great products — therefore all the names are basically the same. We hope you’ll be able to differentiate based on the features and the parent company names.

Before that, it is important to note that we didn’t rely only on what the below service providers advertise, but actually subscribed and tested them ourselves to include more accurate data.

Courtesy of Bright Data

#1 Bright Data Google Search API (Search Engine Crawler)

• Fastest response time (3s) ✅
• Up to 200,000 concurrent requests per hour ✅
• Uses 100% real residential IP proxies to send requests ✅
• Offers pay-as-you-go plan ✅
• Can target 195 countries and millions of cities ✅
• Delivers data in JSON or HTML ✅
• Offers playground to test searches without fees ✅
• Delivers organic Google SERP data + shopping, maps, reviews, hotels, jobs, news, trends, and images ✅
• The price per 1k requests in the up to 100k plan is $2.80 ✅
• Desktop and mobile SERP results ✅

Bright Data’s SERP crawling products are a natural extension of their huge residential proxy network and web unlocker infrastructure. They are by far the go-to choice for enterprises that require an A-level solution, but also provide value to small businesses and freelancers with a 100–200$ per month budget compared to other solutions. Bright Data offers the same tool for other search engines such as Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

Image Courtesy of SERP API

#2 SERP API

• Delivers data only in JSON ❌
• Offers CAPTCHA solving ✅
• Organic Google results+ Maps, Local, Stories, Shopping, Direct Answer, and Knowledge Graph ✅
• Limited to only 1,000 concurrent requests per hour — not suitable for large-scale projects ❌
• Desktop and mobile SERP results ✅
• Offers a free plan of up to 100 searches per month ✅
• Pricing plans are per search, between $8–10 per 1k searches ❌
• Provides a “Legal Shield” for US scraping on the premium plans ✅

SERP API is a powerful Google SERP scraper that enables you to scrape SERPs in real-time, for any keyword. The SERP API has a very user-friendly interface and it is really easy to use, even if you are not a tech-savvy person. This is a popular choice for small operations on a tight budget but keep in mind that since the SERP API entire company constitutes of 10 people their service and support are very limited.

Image Courtesy of Oxylabs

#3 Oxylabs SERP Scraper API

• Delivers data in JSON or CSV ✅
• Uses 100% real residential IP proxies to send requests ✅
• The price per 1k requests in the under 100k plan is $3.40 ❌
• Can target 195 countries and millions of cities ✅
• Allows only desktop SERP results, not mobile ❌
• Delivers organic Google SERP data + shopping, maps, reviews, hotels, jobs, news, trends, and images ✅
• Slow response time (up to 10 seconds) ❌

In terms of premium services, this is as close as you can get to Bright Data’s SERP API, minus a couple of features (no HTML delivery or mobile results). This is why it’s quite surprising they still price their product higher.

Image Courtesy of Smartproxy

#4 Smartproxy SERP Scraping API

• Delivers data in JSON or HTML ✅
• Delivers organic Google SERP data + shopping, maps, reviews, hotels, jobs, news, trends, and images. ✅
• Mixes cheaper data center (only US) IPs with residential to send requests ❌
• The price per 1k requests in the under 100k plan is $2.86 ✅
• Slow response time (we measured over 7 seconds) ❌

Despite being a very popular proxy service for sneaker bots and more, Smartproxy’s SERP API still has room for improvement in terms of its proxy infrastructure and performance.

Image Courtesy of ZenSERP

#5 ZenSERP

• Delivers data only in JSON ❌
• Delivers organic Google SERP data + shopping, maps, reviews, hotels, jobs, news, trends, and images. ✅
• Desktop and mobile SERP results ✅
• Advised to not exceed 400 concurrent requests/hour in standard plans ❌
• Offers playground to test searches without fees ✅
• Can target most countries but not city level ❌
• No transparency regarding proxy IPs ❌
• The price per 1k requests in the under 100k plan is $3.78 ✅

At this spot, to be honest we had a hard time picking a service as ZenSERP offers quite similar pros and cons to other services such as SERPMaster and serpstack.

By now, you’re probably eager to test all of the above tools’ free playgrounds, they’re actually quite fun. Go ahead! And be sure to come back and let us know how you did. In the meantime, we’ll keep testing out new tools and web data service providers to share more actionable tips in our upcoming posts.