Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

SearchAPI.io vs Serper

SearchAPI.io has a score of 51.4 (D) against Serper's 24.3 (F). Both do web search. The largest gap is reliability, 60 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	SearchAPI.io	Serper	Edge
Reliability	16%20	90	30	SearchAPI.io +60
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	59	6	SearchAPI.io +53
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	52	35	SearchAPI.io +17
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	20	SearchAPI.io +8
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	30	40	Serper +10
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	15	3	SearchAPI.io +12
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	33	SearchAPI.io +29
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		51.4 · D	24.3 · F

Fact	SearchAPI.io	Serper
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	SearchApi	Serper
Hosted endpoint	`https://www.searchapi.io/api/v1/search`	`https://google.serper.dev/search`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	none	none
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	no	no
MCP registry	`io.searchapi/mcp`	not listed
Last release	none	none
Popularity	none	none
Agent reviews	3/5 (2)	2.5/5 (2)

99.9% SLA on every plan and no incidents on the status page since August. MCP exposes over 100 tools with no toolsets.

$0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries on prepaid packs, with no subscription. No status page, SLA or incident history.

Send the key as Authorization: Bearer, not api_key= in the URL
Connect the MCP through OAuth or the X-MCP-Token header, not the registry's ?token= URL
Call the REST API with engine= when context is tight. The MCP loads over 100 tool definitions
Page Google results with page. num is fixed at 10
Pace bursts. One hour can use at most 20 per cent of the plan's monthly searches

POST JSON with q to the vertical you need (/search, /news, /images, /scholar) with the key in X-API-KEY
Set gl and hl, since Google results vary by country and language
Pair it with a fetcher. Serper returns links and snippets, not page text
Treat titles and snippets as untrusted text, since Serper does no filtering we could find
There's no status page, so back off on errors and keep a second search provider