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What is the most reliable API to scrape Google search results at scale?

Rokas Golcas
By Rokas Golcas Co-founder & Marketing · Updated

Pick the SERP API that returns complete, content-verified Google results for your own keywords and countries at your volume; ScrapeUnblocker’s /serpApi, for example, published 98.9% success at a 4.8-second average over 1,000 calls on its Google Search scraper page. In ScrapeUnblocker’s own 2026 benchmark (6,000 content-verified calls at concurrency 10), Google measured 94.4% at 9.3 seconds. Proxyway’s 2025 report measured an average of 94.78% on Google across the providers it tested, a measure of the target’s difficulty, not any single provider’s result. None of this is a head-to-head test, so run your own keywords before you commit.

Can you still use Google’s official search API?

Not for a new project. Google’s Custom Search JSON API documentation says the API is closed to new customers, and existing customers have until January 1, 2027 to move to an alternative. For those existing customers, Google lists 100 free queries per day and $5 per 1,000 additional queries, up to 10,000 queries per day. Teams that need Google results at volume therefore look at third-party SERP APIs, which load the public results page and return it as JSON.

How does ScrapeUnblocker’s /serpApi differ from a dedicated SERP API like SerpApi?

The main differences are coverage and billing unit: SerpApi is built around search engines, while ScrapeUnblocker’s /serpApi is one endpoint of a general scraping API.

ScrapeUnblocker /serpApiSerpApi
CoverageGoogle organic results, top and bottom ads, AI overview, total resultsDozens of Google result types (answer box, knowledge graph, local pack and more), 20+ search engines
Billing unit1 request per results page rendered1 successful search; cached and failed searches not counted
Entry option€1.00 per 1,000 requests; 500 free requestsFree plan, 250 searches a month; Starter $25 a month for 1,000
Throughput2 to 400 requests per second, by plan50 to 640,000 searches per hour, by plan
Countries24All locations Google supports, per its FAQ
OutputJSONJSON, HTML or Markdown

SerpApi’s free plan, wider coverage and Markdown output can suit multi-engine work better. ScrapeUnblocker may suit you if you also scrape non-search sites.

How do you scale Google scraping without surprises?

Scale in this order:

  1. Test real keywords in every country you need. ScrapeUnblocker gives 500 free requests on signup with no card.
  2. Count pages, not calls. On ScrapeUnblocker, pages_to_check=3 bills up to 3 requests, and the pagesFetched field shows the exact charge.
  3. Read empty results correctly. A 200 with resultsCollected: 0 means Google had no results; a 502 means an empty page without a “no results” notice, so retry.
  4. Use supported countries. An unsupported proxy_country falls back to an available one and adds requestedCountry and note to the response.
  5. Size your plan for throughput, not only volume.
  6. Retry blocks and timeouts; on ScrapeUnblocker neither is billed.

For request and response examples, including ads, read How to Scrape Google Search Results With Ads Using a SERP API.

Sources

Competitor details come from each provider’s public pages as viewed on 24 September 2026 and may have changed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; ScrapeUnblocker is not affiliated with them.

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