How we test

Web scraping and SERP APIs for SEO

Scraping APIs, SERP APIs and rank tracking data, priced per 1,000 requests from vendor pages, with a plain answer on when you don't need an API at all.

What web scraping and SERP APIs are

Web scraping means having a program read web pages and pull out the data you need: prices, listings, reviews or search results. Doing it yourself gets hard fast, because sites block repeated requests, show CAPTCHAs and load content with JavaScript. A scraping API such as ScraperAPI handles that for you: you send a URL and get the page or clean JSON back.

A SERP API is a scraping API built for search engines. You send a keyword, a location and a device, and it returns the Google results page as structured data: positions, URLs, titles, ads, local packs and other features. SEO tools, rank trackers and AI agents all run on this kind of data.

Who needs them

  • Developers and data teams collecting prices, products or listings on a schedule.
  • SEO teams and agencies building their own rank tracking, keyword research or reporting.
  • Product and AI builders whose apps need fresh search results.

If you only want to track your rankings, you probably don't need an API at all. A rank tracker like SE Ranking does it without code, and we explain when each route is cheaper in our build-or-buy guide to rank tracking APIs.

Guides in this section

How we approach APIs: we read each vendor's pricing page and credit rules on the date shown, convert everything to a price per 1,000 Google searches, and say where credit multipliers change the real cost. We haven't run our own success-rate or speed tests, so we don't publish those numbers, and worked examples are labelled as illustrative. Our method · How we make money