Serper
Blazing-fast Google SERP API purpose-built for LLM agents, with a real free tier.
About
Serper is Google search results as a service for agents: POST a query and get structured JSON back in well under 200ms, including organic results plus knowledge graph, answer box, related searches, and people-also-ask data most competitors omit. Separate endpoints cover news, images, places, maps, scholar, and autocomplete, so agents can target the right index for the task.
It is a favorite in agent stacks for a practical reason: 2,500 free credits with no card required, then about $1 per 1,000 queries, which independent 2026 comparisons call the cheapest paid SERP tier by a wide margin. The API is dead simple (key in a header, JSON in and out) and shows up as the default web-search tool across frameworks like KaibanJS.
The constraint is scope: it is Google-only, purely keyword-based with no semantic mode, and any Google-side scraping policy change can affect results without notice. For live Google grounding at speed and low cost inside agent loops, it is hard to beat.
What it can do
- Google SERP JSON in sub-200ms median response
- Knowledge graph, answer boxes, related searches included
- Endpoints for news, images, places, maps, scholar, autocomplete
- 2,500 free credits; ~$1/1k queries paid
- Simple header-auth REST API
Setup
Sign up at serper.dev for an instant API key (2,500 free credits); POST to https://google.serper.dev/search with the key in the X-API-KEY header.
Prerequisites
A Serper API key; no credit card needed for the free tier.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Free tier (2,500 credits, no card) and ~$1/1k paid pricing corroborated by multiple independent 2026 agent-search comparisons; Sub-200ms median response and rich SERP JSON (knowledge graph, answer box) confirmed across third-party tests. Manual review: Google-only and keyword-based -- a business-model dependency on Google's tolerance, not a technical flaw. License: Proprietary (API-only).
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Free tier (2,500 credits, no card) and ~$1/1k paid pricing corroborated by multiple independent 2026 agent-search comparisons
- · Sub-200ms median response and rich SERP JSON (knowledge graph, answer box) confirmed across third-party tests
- · manual review: Google-only and keyword-based -- a business-model dependency on Google's tolerance, not a technical flaw
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.