# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

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.

- Serper: grade F, 24.3/100, rank #446 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/serper.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/serper.json
- Valyu: grade B, 64.6/100, rank #179 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/valyu.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/valyu.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Serper for nothing in particular (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

| Category | Weight | Serper | Valyu | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 30 | 53 | Valyu +23 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 6 | 87 | Valyu +81 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 35 | 78 | Valyu +43 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 20 | 44 | Valyu +24 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 45 | Valyu +5 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 3 | 80 | Valyu +77 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 33 | 79 | Valyu +46 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **24.3 · F** | **64.6 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Serper | Valyu |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Serper | Valyu |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://google.serper.dev/search` | `https://api.valyu.ai/v1/search` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | none |
| Tools exposed | none | 6 |
| 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 | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | none | 2026-09-12 |
| Popularity | none | 19 stars, 6.7k npm/wk, 7.1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (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

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