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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Serper vs Valyu

Valyu has a score of 64.6 (B) against Serper's 24.3 (F). Both do web search. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 81 points.

SerperSerper · HTTP API F24.3/100#446 of 452 ValyuValyu · HTTP API B64.6/100#179 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Serper for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick Valyu for

  • reliability (+23)
  • schema & documentation (+81)
  • agent ergonomics (+43)
  • security & auth (+24)
  • payments & pricing (+5)
  • maintenance & community (+77)
  • transparency & trust (+46)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runSerperValyuEdge
Reliability16%203053Valyu +23
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2687Valyu +81
Agent ergonomics13%16.23578Valyu +43
Security & auth14%17.52044Valyu +24
Payments & pricing10%12.54045Valyu +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8380Valyu +77
Transparency & trust7%8.83379Valyu +46
Negative events≤1500
Total24.3 · F64.6 · B

Facts side by side

FactSerperValyu
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorSerperValyu
Hosted endpointhttps://google.serper.dev/searchhttps://api.valyu.ai/v1/search
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
Licencenonenone
Tools exposednone6
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
MCP registrynot listednot listed
Last releasenone2026-09-12
Popularitynone19 stars, 6.7k npm/wk, 7.1k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)4.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Serper

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

Valyu

Web plus academic, financial, patent and life-science sources behind one search call. No published rate limits and no Retry-After or backoff guidance.

Before you call either

Serper

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

Valyu

  1. Set max_price and max_num_results on every search to bound cost
  2. Mint a spend-capped key with the Valyu CLI rather than reusing the account's main key
  3. Call valyu_search. The legacy per-vertical MCP tools stop working on 2026-12-01
  4. A 206 means some sources failed. Check which before treating results as complete
  5. DeepResearch is async. Poll valyu_deepresearch_status rather than waiting in one call

Other comparisons with Serper or Valyu

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