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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Serper vs You.com APIs

You.com APIs has a score of 76.9 (BB) against Serper's 24.3 (F). Both do web search. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 79 points.

SerperSerper · HTTP API F24.3/100#446 of 452 You.com APIsYou.com · HTTP API BB76.9/100#24 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Serper for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick You.com APIs for

  • reliability (+55)
  • schema & documentation (+76)
  • agent ergonomics (+49)
  • security & auth (+33)
  • payments & pricing (+48)
  • maintenance & community (+79)
  • transparency & trust (+30)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runSerperYou.com APIsEdge
Reliability16%203085You.com APIs +55
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2682You.com APIs +76
Agent ergonomics13%16.23584You.com APIs +49
Security & auth14%17.52053You.com APIs +33
Payments & pricing10%12.54088You.com APIs +48
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8382You.com APIs +79
Transparency & trust7%8.83363You.com APIs +30
Negative events≤1500
Total24.3 · F76.9 · BB

Facts side by side

FactSerperYou.com APIs
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorSerperYou.com
Hosted endpointhttps://google.serper.dev/searchhttps://api.you.com/v1/search
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nopayer tooling only
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 listedio.github.youdotcom-oss/mcp
Last releasenone2026-09-22
Popularitynone4.4k npm/wk, 92k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)3.8/5 (8)

Verdicts

Serper

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

You.com APIs

x402 and MPP on Web Search and Finance Research, with no account needed. Two API hosts. Answer and Research return 'Missing Authentication Token' on ydc-index.io.

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

You.com APIs

  1. For unattended runs call GET https://api.you.com/v1/search, handle the 402 and pay with x402. It's half the MPP price for search
  2. Use https://api.you.com/mcp?profile=free to try search with no key (100 queries a day)
  3. Send Answer, Research and Finance Research to api.you.com. On ydc-index.io they fail with 'Missing Authentication Token'
  4. Pass ?tools= with only the tools you need to keep the MCP tool list short
  5. On 429, wait for Retry-After and watch X-RateLimit-Remaining before the next burst

Other comparisons with Serper or You.com APIs

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