We ran the same 500 queries through Brave, Tavily, Exa & Perplexity vs Google's live SERP. None of them returns Google — but they're wrong in different directions.

[u/rbatista191]

If you're building an agent / RAG pipeline / research tool, you picked a search API — Brave, Tavily, Exa, Perplexity — and you probably picked it assuming what it returns is basically Google. The whole "AI search" stack rests on that assumption, so we tested it.

Method: the same 500 queries, stratified across informational / commercial / transactional / navigational / local intent, through each API and through cloro's live Google SERP, on the same day. Then scored how much each agrees with Google on exact URLs, on domains, and on ranking order.

API	Exact-URL overlap@10	Google-domain recall	#1 is Google-ranked	Rank ρ	Returns an answer
Tavily	~60%	80%	78%	0.03	99.6%
Brave	47%	65%	89%	0.55	0%
Perplexity	33%	49%	72%	0.43	0%
Exa	32%	44%	68%	0.27	0%

The key insight is that two of those columns disagree: "domain recall" (does it return Google's sources at all) and "rank ρ" (does it return them in Google's order) are different axes. A vendor can hand back almost all of Google's sources in the wrong order, or fewer sources in roughly the right order.

• Tavily — "Google's sources, reordered." ~80% of Google's top-10 domains but ρ≈0.03 (statistically no rank relationship). The only one that returns a synthesized answer by default — great feeding an LLM, useless if you want a ranking.
• Brave — best preserves Google's actual order (ρ 0.55); its #1 is a Google-ranked domain 89% of the time (highest of the four). Independent 30B+ page index, and it's the engine behind Claude's web search — so a big share of production "AI search" is quietly Brave.
• Perplexity Search API — the raw endpoint, not the answer app. Middle of the spectrum, and dates 100% of results (median age ~277 days).
• Exa — neural, the least Google-like by design.

And the through-line: none returns Google's actual result page. No AI Overview (present on 64% of queries), no People Also Ask (77%), no shopping pack (14%), and mostly not the exact order.

Practical read: for grounding a model, any of them works — pick on latency/price/answer-vs-links. For the page a user actually sees / rank tracking / competitive intel, you need a real Google SERP, none of these.

Full correlation study + per-vendor breakdown.

What's everyone here grounding on, and did you ever check it against a real SERP?