Serper charges $1 per 1,000 queries, selling credits that remain valid for a full year rather than expiring monthly. For a RAG prototype running 500 searches a week, you’d spend roughly $2/month on Serper’s pay-as-you-go model, compared to a mandatory $75/month subscription for similar volume on SerpApi. This pricing structure alone makes it the default choice for side projects and irregular workloads.
Functionally, Serper is a low-latency wrapper around Google Search. It strips away the ad-heavy, complex HTML of a standard search result and returns clean, structured JSON containing knowledge graphs, organic links, and snippets. While competitors like SerpApi offer support for Baidu, Yandex, and Yahoo, Serper focuses almost exclusively on Google. This specialization pays off in speed: typical latency hovers around 1 second, whereas multi-engine competitors often average 3-5 seconds per request. For an AI agent waiting on a tool output to continue generating tokens, that difference is noticeable.
The API is designed specifically for LLMs. The JSON output nests "people also ask" and related searches in a way that’s easy to inject into a prompt context window without heavy post-processing. Integration is trivial; if you are using LangChain or LlamaIndex, Serper is supported as a first-class tool, often requiring just an API key to activate.
However, the tool feels like a “hacker” product rather than an enterprise platform. The dashboard is bare-bones, support is email-only, and you won’t find the extensive legal indemnification or compliance documentation provided by larger rivals like Bright Data. Additionally, if you need deep pagination—pulling 100 results per query—your credit consumption doubles, effectively raising the price to $2 per 1,000 queries.
Skip Serper if you are building an enterprise SEO tool that tracks rankings across Bing and DuckDuckGo; SerpApi is worth the premium there. But if you are an AI engineer building a research agent that just needs to "Google this" and get a JSON response fast, Serper is the most cost-efficient and developer-friendly option available.
Pricing
The free tier grants 2,500 one-time credits on signup, which is enough to build and test a substantial POC. Unlike most competitors, these don't expire after 30 days.
The paid model is strictly pre-paid credits starting at $50 for 50,000 queries ($1/1k).
Hidden Multiplier: A standard query returns 10 results for 1 credit. If you request 100 results (the max), it costs 2 credits per query.
Cost Cliff: There is no massive cliff; you just top up. Compare this to SerpApi, where the entry price is $75/month for only 5,000 searches ($15/1k), making Serper roughly 15x cheaper for low-volume users.
Technical Verdict
Serper is a lightweight REST API that delivers structured JSON. Latency is consistently fast (~1s), making it viable for real-time agent loops. Docs are minimal but sufficient, mostly consisting of cURL examples and JSON response schemas. First-party support in LangChain means you can often start with zero boilerplate code.
Quick Start
import requests
import json
url = "https://google.serper.dev/search"
payload = json.dumps({"q": "apple inc", "num": 10})
headers = {'X-API-KEY': 'YOUR_API_KEY', 'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
print(response.json()['organic'][0]['link'])Watch Out
- Requesting 100 results per query costs 2 credits instead of 1.
- Only supports Google Search (and associated verticals like News/Images); no Bing backup.
- Credits expire after 12 months if unused (generous, but not literally 'forever').
- Support is limited to email; no live chat or guaranteed response times.