SerpApi
SerpApiScrapes search engine results pages and returns them as structured JSON. One metered product covers roughly 130 engines - Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Walmart, Yandex, YouTube and the rest - with organic results, answer boxes, knowledge graph, local packs and ads parsed into fields.
SerpApi operates no index of its own: what it sells is scraping and parsing of other people's search engines, which is why its openness record has no index to be closed about and its terms carry a "U.S. Legal Shield" offering up to $2 million of coverage for scraping search engine data. The Python client is published under the unrelated-looking name `google-search-results` while the npm client is plain `serpapi`, so a package lookup on the product's own name lands on the JavaScript one.
Openness
1 high confidence- license
- Proprietary(API-only)
- source
- closed(no index and no parser published
- managed
- cloud SaaS with API keys, metered in searches per month, from $25 for 1,000
SerpApi's service is closed: the scraping, parsing and proxy infrastructure that produces its results is not published. Its client packages -- `google-search-results` on PyPI and `serpapi` on npm -- are MIT, but they are clients, not the underlying service.
- https://serpapi.com/pricing recorded 2026-09-17
Metered plans - Starter $25/month for 1,000 searches, Developer $75 for 5,000, Production $150 for 15,000, Big Data $275 - with every engine drawing on one search quota. No self-hosted or source-available option anywhere on the page.
Adoption
4 medium confidenceAdoption is measured by PyPI downloads of `google-search-results`, SerpApi's official Python client: a client package is normally a weak usage proxy, but it holds here because SerpApi sells exactly one metered product the package exists only to call. Confidence stays medium because the Python client is one of several ways to reach the API, and its npm counterpart adds further, uncounted downloads.
- https://pypistats.org/api/packages/google-search-results/recent recorded 2026-09-16
last_month = 1,605,478 downloads for `google-search-results`, SerpApi's official Python client (last_week 381,730, last_day 69,011).
Capability
3 high confidenceEvery SerpApi output mode renders the search engine's own results page: the `organic_results` object carries title, link and snippet, and even HTML mode returns the raw Google results page rather than the pages behind its links. No endpoint returns a linked page's content, which puts it level with Serper, the other product that resells someone else's SERP as structured data.
- https://serpapi.com/search-api recorded 2026-09-17
"Our Google Search API allows you to scrape results from the Google search page." JSON output "includes structured data for Organic Results, Local Results, Ad Results, the Knowledge Graph, Direct Answer boxes, Images Results, News Results, Shopping Results, Video Results, and more." The `output` parameter: json, `html` which "gives you the raw HTML results from Google", or `md`. The organic_results fields are title, link, displayed_link and snippet.
Verified 2026-09-17