SearchApi

Reviewed SearchApi's pricing, engine list, and reviews on 2026-10-26. No account was created — desk research with staged receipts.

SERP APIs are commodities until something breaks: proxies rot, Google changes layout, requests fail, and you've paid for garbage. SearchApi's answer to that whole category of pain is billing: only searches that return HTTP 200 cost money. Beyond that, it's a serious engine catalog — Google Search with coordinate-level geo-targeting, plus dedicated APIs for Google AI Overview, Gemini, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, then Maps, Scholar, Flights, Amazon, TikTok, Zillow, and dozens more under one key. Pricing runs $4 per thousand searches at $40/month down to $2 at Scale ($500/month), with 99.9% SLA and — from the $100 Production tier — a Legal Protection Guarantee of up to $2 million under U.S. law covering how SearchApi collects public data. G2 backs the product with real volume: 4.6 across 213 reviews, praising example-driven docs and support that actually answers endpoint questions.

The Catch

The ceiling is throughput, not price. Every plan throttles usage to 20% of its credits per hour — Scale's 250,000 monthly searches still means at most 50,000 in any given hour. For monitoring cadences that's irrelevant; for a one-shot backfill of two years of rank history it means queues and math. Second, the headline pricing covers Google SERP only; the AI engine endpoints that make SearchApi interesting in 2026 don't publish rates on the public page, so if your workload is half Perplexity and Gemini, budget discovery requires talking to sales or burning trial credits. Third, the legal guarantee — genuinely valuable — covers their collection, not your use of the data; read that FAQ sentence twice if your application is sensitive. And Trustpilot is a ghost town (zero reviews), so G2 is the only independent voice. Who wastes money here: buyers who need instant full-throttle bursts, and teams that assume the $2/1k rate applies to every engine on the footer list. Prototype on the free 100 requests, then price your real engine mix before committing.

What it actually costs (Google SERP engine)

Where it fits

SearchApi is the specialist next to Apify's generalist marketplace — fewer moving parts, an SLA, and a legal backstop, tuned for search data specifically. If AI answer engines are the new SERP, someone still has to scrape them; this vendor priced the meter honestly. Failed searches are free. The hourly throttle is not.