Top 10 Best API Search Companies in 2026

Choosing an API search provider is now a core infrastructure decision. Teams need clean, reliable search data for SEO platforms, AI agents, analytics dashboards and real-time competitive intelligence, but the market is crowded and pricing models vary a lot. It is easy to overpay or pick a tool that does not match your use case.

Strategic placement of search features can boost conversions; for inspiration, check out this breakdown of the best API search companies’ homepages and their design choices.

This blog compares leading API search companies in 2026 so you can choose one that truly matches your technical and business needs.

Leading API Search Providers in 2026

1. SerpApi

SerpApi is one of the most established Google Search APIs, with support for many engines such as Google, Bing and others. It handles proxies and captchas for you and returns structured JSON that includes all rich SERP features.

It is a strong fit if you:

• Build SEO tools that need accurate position tracking.
• Need many search engines in a single integration.
• Want mature documentation and language libraries.

Pricing is subscription based with several tiers and a free trial, and is known to be on the higher side compared with newer budget options, but you get stability and support in return.

2. DataForSEO

DataForSEO provides a broad SERP API that covers Google, Bing and other engines, with Regular, Advanced and HTML modes for flexible output. You can retrieve organic, paid, local and other SERP elements in structured form.

Key strengths:

• Very granular control over search location, language and device.
• Task based model that works well for high volume rank tracking.
• Competitive per SERP pricing, especially at scale.

DataForSEO is well suited for platforms that run millions of daily checks and need a clear SERP pricing breakdown rather than AI focused features.

3. Bright Data

Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is a major data collection and proxy platform with a dedicated SERP API for Google and other search engines. It offers advanced query parameters for localization, pagination, device type and more.

What stands out:

• Huge proxy network and strong success rates for difficult targets.
• Multiple scraping products in one ecosystem, including Web Scraper API and datasets.
• Enterprise level support and SLAs.

Bright Data works best for large organizations that already treat search data as a critical data pipeline and are comfortable with higher pricing in exchange for reach and reliability.

4. Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers a SERP Scraper API as part of its wider Web Scraper API family. It focuses on collecting timely Google and other search engine data, returning either raw HTML or parsed JSON, and it manages proxies and headless browser rendering for you.

Strengths:

• Good balance between cost and enterprise features.
• Built in headless browser and JavaScript rendering.
• Location targeting down to city or coordinate level.

Oxylabs is a solid choice if you want a general scraping partner and SERP coverage as part of that, instead of a SERP only vendor.

5. Apify

Apify is a web automation and scraping platform where Google Search API is one of many ready made “actors”. You run an actor that collects search results, then consume the dataset via API or connect it to other workflows.

This works well when you:

• Need SERP data plus other web data in the same toolchain.
• Prefer a low code style with hosted workflows.
• Want flexibility to customize scraping logic around search.

Apify is ideal for teams combining search monitoring with larger web scraping, enrichment or lead generation projects.

6. Serper

Serper is a focused Google Search API that markets itself on speed and cost efficiency. It returns web, image, news, video and other verticals in one fast API, often responding in one to two seconds.

Highlights:

• Pay as you go pricing from about 1 dollar per 1,000 requests, with lower rates at volume.
• 2,500 free queries to start testing.
• Strong fit for AI tools and SEO dashboards that need high throughput.

If your priority is the lowest cost per SERP without running your own proxies, Serper is a compelling option.

7. Brave Search API

Brave Search API exposes an independent web index of more than 30 billion pages, which is not based on Google or Bing. It offers web, images, news, videos and AI grounding features for building privacy respecting search experiences and AI agents.

Benefits:

• Independence from big engine licensing, important as Bing Search APIs are being shut down for many customers.
• Built in features like Search Goggles to re rank or filter domains.
• Transparent, usage based pricing with a generous free tier and clear per 1,000 request rates.

Brave is a strong choice if privacy, long term index stability and AI friendly rights for grounding matter to you.

8. Tavily

Tavily is an AI native search API designed for LLMs and agents. Instead of returning raw SERP rows, it aggregates multiple sources, ranks them and returns concise, LLM ready snippets plus citations in a single call.

Why teams like it:

• Optimized for retrieval augmented generation, not just SEO.
• Flexible plans, including a free tier with credits and pay as you go pricing.
• Fast and ultra fast search depths for latency sensitive agents.

If your main workload is AI chatbots or research agents, Tavily reduces the amount of custom post processing you need.

9. Exa

Exa is a semantic web search API built specifically for AI. It uses embeddings based search to return pages that match the meaning of a query, not only the keywords, and exposes endpoints for search, content extraction, similar pages, answers and automated research.

Key points:

• Designed to power AI agents with citable JSON highlights rather than opaque summaries.
• Real time crawling for fresh content and deep research workflows.
• Custom, often enterprise oriented pricing with volume discounts.

Exa is best when you care more about semantic relevance and AI quality than exact SERP layout.

10. Zenserp

Zenserp provides a real time SERP API for major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. It covers search, images, maps, news, shopping and more, with JSON responses that are straightforward to integrate.

It is a good fit if you:

• Need multi engine coverage with simple REST endpoints.
• Want a mix of free and paid tiers for gradual scaling.
• Focus on classic SERP scraping for SEO, monitoring and price comparison.

Zenserp is especially attractive to teams that value reliability and simplicity over AI specific features.

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