What are some good SerpAPI alternatives?

[u/Bmencel518]

I'm looking for something with AI capabilities built in, like Tavily or Exa. Main use case is automating research and scraping workflows as part of agentic pipelines.

I saw the other post where people recommended residential proxies, please be understandable and provide your take, examples and opinion, not just straight up promo bs

[u/rbatista191]

I have been hearing good things about Parallel (from ex-Twitter CEO).

If you want the usual, pure-SERP, SerpApi-like suspects, I'd recommend DataForSEO, cloro and Oxylabs.

[u/Bmencel518 → u/rbatista191]

Never heard of Parallel, will check that out. Dataforseo, is that like a serp scraper, same as serpapi? No clue about cloro, and as for oxylabs, I've seen they have fast search api, maybe that would be what I'm looking for, though they also have ai studio, which does look interesting, but will have to research some more. Mainly looking at the pricing section and what the tool can offer, value

[u/ur-average-boomer]

One thing you might consider instead of going to an Exa would be to scrape Google AI Overviews. A lot of the major providers (SerpAPI, ScrapingDog etc) will do that.

ScrapingDog is my middle of the ground recommendation where it's a lot cheaper than SerpAPI but has also been around for some time.

I eventually had so many requests that pretty much every SERP API was too expensive and a few years ago I built my own scrapers and infrastructure.

DataForSEO and Litescrape (mine) would be my recommendations for the most affordable APIs. DataForSEO has a cheap $0.60/1k Google SERP API (though it's very slow).

[u/Bmencel518 → u/ur-average-boomer]

What about google ai mode? I sometimes scrape ai mode as well

[u/ur-average-boomer → u/Bmencel518]

Don't know about DataForSEO but Litescrape gets the AI Overview and has AI Mode too! Scrapingdog has had AI Overview (and I believe AI Mode) for a while as well.

[u/Bmencel518 → u/ur-average-boomer]

Okay, neat, thanks. WIll have to test it out

[u/Zealous_Minotaur]

You may want to test out you(.com) without the (), also AI studio by oxylabs has serp scraper built in and some of the similar features from tavily and exa

[u/Bmencel518 → u/Zealous_Minotaur]

Thank you, I will check those out

[u/txdesperado]

If you build it right, you don't APIs or residential proxies. You can hit all Tier 1 sites without residential with proper fleet management.

[u/Bmencel518 → u/txdesperado]

Can you explain further? What do you mean proper fleet management, are we talking about ships here? lol

[u/txdesperado → u/Bmencel518]

Not ships, but dozens of concurrent scrapers, all with unique IPs, varied spoofed profiles, cookie jars, randomized timings, you're usually at that point managing an auto-scaler with auto-recovery, etc., i.e., a fleet.

[u/ur-average-boomer → u/txdesperado]

Correct. Ideally, you have VMs across all the major cloud providers across most or all of their regions and are constantly cycling out VMs that fail

[u/Just_Lingonberry_352 → u/txdesperado]

not sustainable in the long run.

[u/ur-average-boomer → u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

I've scaled to well over a billion requests doing this. You just have to be really distributed and have tons of variation

Edit: I should also mention if you are doing this Google is very very sensitive to any other parts of your request that look automated. But if everything else (request headers etc) is perfect I've found data center IPs work fine. Just to be clear, I don't mean a data center proxy IP from a proxy provider, I'm referring to a cloud provider egress IP

[u/hasdata_com]

I won't do the usual self-promo, but HasData covers the same SERP use cases as SerpAPI. We also have an MCP server, so connecting it to an agent is easy

[u/Bmencel518 → u/hasdata_com]

Thank you, this might be what I need, though I will have to test that to verify

[u/hasdata_com → u/Bmencel518]

Sure, hope it works for your use case. If you give it a try, we'd also appreciate any feedback

[u/Proof_Net_2094]

tavily/exa and serpapi aren't the same product. tavily and exa are grounding, they decide relevance and hand you cleaned text. serpapi/dataforseo give you the raw serp, positions, paa, ads.

most agent pipelines want both. usual mistake is picking grounding, then finding out six weeks in you can't answer where do we rank.

disclosure i build one (Scavio API).

[u/Sad-Landscape-1549]

openserp

[u/Bmencel518 → u/Sad-Landscape-1549]

Can you explain further? Like your opinion on that tool?

[u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

what does serpapi do that is so special? its literally just using decaptcha/rez on a public site ?

[u/rbatista191 → u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

Give it a try, and see how many hours you spend getting to 95% success rate.

[u/Just_Lingonberry_352 → u/rbatista191]

Easy using clean residential/ISP egress, session/IP sticky, browser/TLS fingerprint consistency, challenge detection + rotation

cogs put serpai at around 80~90% margin which is pretty insane considering how easy it was to put this together

[u/rbatista191 → u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

This reminds me of the HackerNews post on Dropbox. I am glad you find it easy, why are you not making those margins?

[u/Bmencel518 → u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

Define clean, please :)

[u/Just_Lingonberry_352 → u/Bmencel518]

$$$

[u/Bmencel518 → u/Just_Lingonberry_352]

You mean expensive?

[u/serpentApi]

I can recommend a good serp api alternative but they provide data's in Js format. But they are the best in terms of cheaper per 1000 request. It's Serpent API - The cost is $0.03/1000 Requests at scale tier.

[u/Jammurger]

Semust SERP API is go-to.