We Tested the Best SERP Scraper APIs

We benchmarked 5 SERP providers using 7,000 live requests across Google, Bing, and Yandex. See which providers came out ahead on success rate and speed:

SERP scraper API benchmark results

Read the full methodology.

Stability of SERP scraper solutions

We also run live requests every 15 min, with caching disabled, a 60s timeout, and 250+ queries across Google, Bing, and Yandex in the United States.

The chart shows the daily success rate and average response time (successful calls):

Top 6 SERP scrapers free trial

SERP scraper APIs

Bright Data addresses a search by URL rather than by query, which is the main structural difference from the others. You post the search engine URL to api.brightdata.com/request with your SERP zone.

Coverage: that parameter works on Google and Bing, with Google returning separate blocks for AI Overview, People Also Ask and related searches alongside the organic results. On Yandex it answers “JSON output is not supported”, so that engine is HTML only.

Output: data_format decides what comes back. Parsed results are requested on the target URL instead of the request body, by appending brd_json=1.

Oxylabs has a dedicated source per engine, including google_search and yandex_search. Each takes a query rather than a URL.

• Parameters: geo_location, domain, and paging through pages and start_page.
• Parsing: not uniform across sources. yandex_search returns an error when parse is set to true, so that engine can only be had as HTML.
• URLs: a general google source accepts any Google URL, which is the route to use when you hold URLs rather than queries.

Decodo has SERP targets for Google and Bing, called with a query plus geo, locale and device_type, and paging through page_from and page_count. The same endpoint serves its other scraping targets, and a headless mode runs JavaScript when the target needs it.

SerpApi runs a separate engine per search engine, google, bing and yandex, all called from the same /search endpoint with the engine chosen by parameter. You send a query rather than a URL, so there is no search URL to build.

Caching: a no_cache flag forces a fresh fetch. Cached results are free and do not count against the quota.

Localisation: Google takes gl and hl for country and language plus a google_domain, Bing takes cc, Yandex takes langand a yandex_domain.

Output: parsed JSON by default, or the raw page with output=html.

Zyte splits SERP across two routes rather than one product, which is worth knowing before you build against it.

Bing and Yandex: no such endpoint. These go through the general extract endpoint with a serp flag and the search URL, so the request you write for Google is not the request you write for the other two.

Google: a dedicated search endpoint taking a domain and a query, with a style parameter that decides between generic results and the engine specific layout.

Nimble covers Google, Bing and Yandex from a single endpoint, with the engine selected by a search_engine parameter rather than a separate route.

• Parameters: query, country, locale, domain, device, num_results and a page number.
• Output: parsing is optional, and when it is on the response carries the parsed data and the raw HTML together, so you do not have to choose between them.
• Shape: parsed results are grouped by entity type rather than one flat list, with organic results, pagination and search information in separate buckets.

SERP scraper benchmark methodology

We benchmarked 5 SERP providers (SerpApi, Oxylabs, Decodo, Zyte, Nimble) on Google, Bing and Yandex. Every provider was sent the same 500 queries against every engine it supports, for 7,000 requests in total.

Query set

The 500 queries were fixed in advance and reused for every provider, so no two providers were measured on different searches.

• Languages: 260 English, 116 Russian, 45 German, 45 French, 34 Spanish. Russian is there because testing Yandex with English queries does not reflect how it is used.
• Countries: 195 US, 116 Russia, 65 UK, 45 Germany, 45 France, 34 Spain.

Test parameters

• Requests: one query per request, no batching. 500 queries per engine, so 1,500 requests per provider. Decodo has no Yandex target and ran 1,000.
• Execution: sequential, one request at a time, with a one second pause between them.
• Timeout: 120 seconds. We raised this twice during setup, from 60 and then from 90, because the shorter limits were cutting off responses that arrived correctly: one provider returned a valid Yandex page at 59.4 seconds and another a valid 856KB Bing page at 95.4 seconds.
• Caching: disabled on every provider that offers a flag for it.
• Bodies: every response was saved, successful or not.

Provider implementations

Each provider was called through its own SERP product rather than a general scraper, and asked for raw HTML so that all five were validated the same way.

• SerpApi: the google, bing and yandex engines with output=html and no_cache=true.
• Oxylabs: the google_search, bing_search and yandex_search sources with a query and geo location.
• Decodo: the google_search and bing_search targets with a query, geo and locale. No Yandex target exists.
• Zyte: the search endpoint for Google, and the extract endpoint with a serp flag for Bing and Yandex.
• Nimble: the SERP endpoint with search_engine set per engine.

Success

A request counts as successful when the returned body contains the result markup for that engine. The check runs in stages and we record which one passed, so a change in a search engine’s markup reads differently in the data from a provider returning nothing.

1. Parsed results: Some providers return parsed JSON for an engine rather than HTML. A payload with a non-empty organic list passes here.
2. Challenge page: A body carrying a bot check marker fails, whatever else is on it.
3. CSS selector. An engine selector matched: #search, .tF2Cxc or .yuRUbf for Google, .b_algo, .b_caption or .b_title for Bing, .serp-item, .Organic or .content__left for Yandex.
4. Text marker: An engine specific string was present.

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Cite this benchmark

Pick the format that matches where you're publishing. Pasting the link version into your CMS preserves the backlink.

@misc{sipi2026,
  author = {Şipi, Nazlı},
  title  = {{We Tested the Best SERP Scraper APIs}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = sep,
  howpublished    = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/serp-scraper-api}},
  note   = {AIMultiple. Retrieved September 29, 2026}
}

Changelog

17 updates

202620252024

1. Aug 4

   Removed the NetNut SERP API section.

2. Jun 2

   Removed the Nimbleway, DataForSEO, Serpstack, and ScraperAPI provider sections.

3. Feb 16

   Added SerpApi to the list of SERP Scraper APIs.

4. Jan 21

   Replaced the starting price and free trial for SerpApi.

5. Jan 7

   Added SerpApi to the list of SERP scraper APIs.

6. Jan 6

   Added the "SERP scraper API benchmark results" section.

Nazlı Şipi

AI Researcher

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Nazlı is a data analyst at AIMultiple. She has prior experience in data analysis across various industries, where she worked on transforming complex datasets into actionable insights.

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