Best SEO API: What Each One Costs Per 1,000 Calls

The best SEO API for raw Google results is Serper, at a published $0.30 per 1,000 queries with 2,500 free queries and no monthly plan. The best SEO API for anything that also needs keyword volumes, backlinks or on-page data is DataForSEO, at $2.00 per 1,000 SERP calls in Live mode — 6.7 times Serper’s rate, bought back by one prepaid balance that covers six APIs instead of four vendor contracts. If you want a full toolkit’s worth of reports behind the API instead, SE Ranking sells one from $50 for 250,000 credits. This page puts every vendor into the same unit, cost per 1,000 SERP calls, and prints what each type of call on DataForSEO actually charged.

Jump to: cost per 1,000 calls · which one fits you · what DataForSEO charged · is it the cheapest · the vendors · the free tiers · into WordPress · the verdict · questions

What does an SEO API cost per 1,000 calls?

Nobody publishes a comparable number. One vendor prices per request, one per 1,000, one per credit where a Google search costs 25 credits, one per month with a search allowance attached. The table below converts all of them into the same unit: what 1,000 Google SERP calls cost on the cheapest plan you can actually start on, with the arithmetic shown.

Prices read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 17 September 2026. Per-1,000 figures computed from the plan price and the included volume at the entry tier, except where the vendor publishes a per-1,000 rate directly.

Rank that last column and Serper wins by a distance. Then buy a thousand calls a month and the ranking inverts, because most of these vendors sell a monthly minimum rather than calls. A thousand Google SERP calls a month costs $0.30 on Serper and $2.00 on DataForSEO in Live mode, against $25 on SerpApi, $40 on SearchApi, $40 on Scrapingdog and $49 on Oxylabs or ScraperAPI — because on those four the entry plan is the bill whether you make the calls or not. At that volume ScraperAPI’s Hobby plan is 163 times the price of Serper for the same thousand results.

The opposite is true at scale. Cross a few hundred thousand calls a month and the plans get cheaper per call than the prepaid rates, which is why the sensible order is: start prepaid, move to a plan when your monthly spend passes the plan price.

Which SEO API fits what you are building?

Pick what data you need, roughly how many calls a month and whether a monthly plan is acceptable. Every branch below is grounded in a price read from the vendor’s own page, and where two of your answers pull towards different vendors the box says so rather than pretending one product covers it.

Rates and free-tier sizes read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 17 September 2026.

What DataForSEO actually charges per call

DataForSEO publishes a rate card but not what a real call costs once parameters are applied, and the difference is where the money goes. Every figure below is the charge the API itself returned on the call, read on WPNeon’s own account on 17 September 2026.

Charges measured on WPNeon’s DataForSEO account on 17 September 2026 by making each call and reading the cost the API returned. The account shows $51.00 deposited in total and $12.56 remaining, so $38.44 has been spent on live work.

Keywords Data bills per request, not per keyword. One keyword and twenty-four keywords both cost $0.09, and DataForSEO’s rate card puts up to 1,000 keywords in a single task. So 1,000 keywords looked up one at a time cost $90.00, and the same 1,000 batched into one request cost $0.09 — a thousandfold difference for identical data. If you take one thing from this page, take that.

SERP bills per page of ten results. Depth 10 charged $0.00200 and depth 15 charged $0.00400, because 15 results spill into a second page. Asking for five extra results doubled the bill. Set depth in multiples of ten and you never pay for a page you did not want.

The cheapest call is 600 times cheaper than the dearest. An On-Page instant pages call at $0.00015 against a Keywords Data request at $0.09. Costs on this API are not spread evenly, so the endpoint you loop over is the one worth checking.

Two of those measurements also confirm the published rate card exactly, which is a reason to trust the rest of it: Labs charges $0.012 a task plus $0.00012 an item, and a ranked-keywords call returning one row charged $0.01212. On-Page instant pages is published at $0.00015 a crawled page and charged $0.00015.

Is DataForSEO the cheapest SERP API?

No. For raw Google results DataForSEO is roughly seven times the price of the cheapest option. Its Live mode costs $2.00 per 1,000 SERP calls against Serper’s published $0.30 per 1,000, and even its slowest standard queue at $0.60 per 1,000 is double Serper’s rate. If all you need is search results at volume, buy them from a single-purpose SERP API and do not let a roundup talk you into a platform.

What DataForSEO sells instead is breadth on one account. The cheap SERP APIs return search results and nothing else, so a project that also needs keyword volumes, backlink counts and an on-page audit is otherwise three or four vendors, three or four contracts and three or four sets of credentials. On DataForSEO those are six API families drawing on one prepaid balance: SERP, Keywords Data, DataForSEO Labs, Backlinks, On-Page and Domain Analytics.

The commercial terms are the other half of it. There is no monthly subscription, the minimum payment is $50, and DataForSEO’s own FAQ states that the balance has no expiry date and funds stay until you use them. Registration adds a $1 test credit that can be spent over an unlimited period. That combination — no plan, no clock — is worth more than a lower headline rate to anyone whose usage is lumpy.

So the honest split is simple. High volume, search results only: something else. Mixed data needs, unpredictable months, or a small team that does not want four invoices: DataForSEO.

The vendors, and what each one is for

DataForSEO

For projects that need more than search results and would rather not hold four vendor accounts. Pay as you go with a $50 minimum payment and no subscription; the balance has no expiry date; registration adds a $1 credit usable over an unlimited period. Google Organic SERP is $0.002 a call in Live mode, $0.0012 in the priority queue and $0.0006 in the standard queue, where one SERP means ten results. Beyond SERPs it sells Keywords Data, DataForSEO Labs, Backlinks, On-Page and Domain Analytics on the same balance. The limitation is the SERP rate itself: at $2.00 per 1,000 in Live mode it is the most expensive way on this page to buy nothing but Google results.

DataForSEO pricing

Serper

For anyone whose requirement is Google results, fast and cheap. The published rate is $0.30 per 1,000 queries, with 2,500 free queries and no card required. Endpoints cover organic search, images, news, maps, places, videos, shopping, scholar, patents and autocomplete. The honest limitation is what the public site does not say: there is no tier table and no statement about whether purchased credits expire, and the terms page covers refunds within seven days but not expiry. At high volume, confirm your rate in writing before you commit a budget to it.

Serper

SerpApi

For teams who want a managed plan, legal cover and a free tier that never ends. The free plan is 250 searches a month; paid plans run $25 for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000 and $275 for 30,000. Only successful searches count, and cached, errored and failed searches are not billed. That works out at $25.00 per 1,000 on the entry plan falling to $9.17 at $275 a month, which is the dearest per-call rate here by a wide margin. You are paying for support, a U.S. legal shield and reliability rather than for data volume.

SerpApi pricing

Scrapingdog

For volume buyers who want one credit pool across many scrapers. Plans start free with 200 credits and run from $40 for 200,000 credits up through 27 tiers. A Google SERP Light request costs 5 credits and a Google SERP Advance, AI Mode, Images or Shopping request costs 10, so the $40 Lite plan is $1.00 per 1,000 SERP Light calls and the $90 Standard plan is $0.45. Failed requests are not charged and every plan has access to all APIs. The limitation is that the credit-to-request conversion changes by endpoint, so the headline cost per 1,000 credits is not the cost per 1,000 searches.

Scrapingdog pricing

SearchApi

For a middle position between Serper’s prices and SerpApi’s hand-holding. Plans are $40 for 10,000 searches, $100 for 35,000, $250 for 100,000, $500 for 250,000 and on up to $5,000 for 5,000,000, with 100 free requests to start and no charge for failed requests. That is $4.00 per 1,000 at the entry plan and $1.00 per 1,000 at the top. There is no commitment beyond the month. The limitation is that the pricing page does not state whether unused searches roll over, so treat the monthly allowance as use-it-or-lose-it until told otherwise.

SearchApi pricing

Bright Data

For enterprise buyers who want no monthly minimum and a very large network behind the requests. The SERP API is $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go, with a Scale plan at $499 a month including 380,000 requests and $1.30 per 1,000 beyond that, which computes to $1.31 per 1,000 across the included volume. The free tier is 5,000 records a month with no card, and charging is on successful delivery only. The limitation is procurement rather than price: this is a compliance-heavy platform sold to companies, and the smallest sensible unit of engagement is larger than a side project.

Bright Data SERP API

Oxylabs

For buyers who want per-result billing with a named support contract. The Google rate is $1.00 per 1,000 results on the $49 Micro plan, $0.90 on the $99 Starter and $0.80 on the $249 Advanced, with a free trial of up to 2,000 results. Amazon results are cheaper at $0.50, $0.45 and $0.40 per 1,000. The limitation is the monthly floor: at a thousand calls a month the $49 minimum makes the effective rate $49 per 1,000, so this only makes sense once your volume genuinely fills a plan.

Oxylabs SERP Scraper API

ScraperAPI

For general-purpose scraping where Google is one target among many. Plans run $49 for 100,000 API credits, $149 for 1,000,000, $299 for 3,000,000 and up, with a seven-day trial of 5,000 credits. The number that matters for this comparison is the domain multiplier: Google and Bing requests cost 25 credits each, so the $49 Hobby plan is $12.25 per 1,000 Google searches and the $299 Business plan is $2.49. That makes it a poor choice for SERPs specifically and a reasonable one if Google is a minority of your traffic.

ScraperAPI pricing

Zyte

For crawling projects where SERPs are incidental. Zyte API prices by response type rather than by target: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses on pay as you go, falling at the $100, $200 and $500 monthly commitment tiers, where the $500 tier quotes $0.06 to $0.61 per 1,000 HTTP responses. New accounts get $5 of free credit on a 30-day trial. The reason it is not ranked above is straightforward: no price for a Google SERP request is published, and a range spanning two orders of magnitude is not a quote.

Zyte pricing

Apiserpent

For buyers willing to prepay a large sum for the lowest per-call rate on this page. The default pay-as-you-go rate is $0.60 per 1,000 Google SERP calls with a $10 minimum deposit and 10 free calls. A one-time deposit of $100 moves that to $0.06 per 1,000 and a deposit of $500 to $0.03 per 1,000, with the tier locked permanently. Deposited credits do not expire; promotional bonus credits expire 30 days after they are granted. The limitation is the gate: the $0.03 figure that appears in comparison articles is a $500 commitment, not a price anyone can walk up and pay.

Apiserpent pricing

SE Ranking, Semrush and Ahrefs: the index APIs

These three sell access to their own crawled index rather than live Google scraping, which is why they are not in the per-1,000 ranking. SE Ranking publishes the most: pay as you go from $50 for 250,000 credits, an API add-on from $149 a month, or API access inside the Core plan at $129 a month and Growth at $279, though the credits each endpoint consumes are not on that page. Semrush requires a Business-tier subscription before standard API access, then separately purchased API units whose price is not published; its documentation gives consumption examples such as 10 units a line for live organic keywords and 50 for historical. Ahrefs includes API access on paid plans from $129 a month (Lite), charging at least 50 units a request and capping rows per request at 100 on Lite, 250 on Standard and 500 on Advanced.

SE Ranking API · Semrush API access · Ahrefs pricing

Is there a free SEO API, and what do the free tiers contain?

There is no free SEO API in the sense of a permanent, unlimited one, but seven of the vendors here will let you build and test without paying anything. The sizes differ by two orders of magnitude.

Serper publishes 2,500 free queries with no card required, which is the largest free allowance on this page and enough to finish a small project outright. Bright Data gives 5,000 SERP records a month on its free tier, which is larger still but attached to an enterprise signup. ScraperAPI gives 5,000 credits across a seven-day trial, which at 25 credits a Google request is 200 searches. Oxylabs offers a trial of up to 2,000 results.

SerpApi’s free plan is 250 searches a month and does not expire, which makes it the best option for a low-volume production job that must keep running. SearchApi gives 100 requests and Scrapingdog 200 credits, both one-off. DataForSEO adds a $1 credit on registration that can be spent over an unlimited period; at its own published rates that is around 833 SERPs in the priority queue, or 20,000 keywords of Google Ads metrics, and it also runs a free sandbox for testing request and response formats without charge.

Semrush and Ahrefs have no free API tier: both require a paid platform subscription first.

Getting SEO API data into WordPress or an AI assistant

An API only pays for itself when the data reaches the place you make decisions. For a WordPress site that usually means one of three routes: a plugin that calls the API and stores results, a scheduled script that writes to the database, or an MCP server that lets an AI assistant make the calls directly in a conversation.

WPNeon runs Easy MCP AI on this site, and that is how the DataForSEO calls in the table above were made: the plugin exposes wp_dfs_* tools over an MCP endpoint, the assistant calls them with the site’s own DataForSEO credentials, and each response carries the cost of that call. That is the whole reason the measured column exists — the charge comes back with the data rather than appearing on a monthly invoice.

If that route interests you, the mechanics are covered in the comparison of WordPress MCP servers and in the guide to MCP plugins. Before you connect anything, read what an MCP setup actually exposes: an API key with a prepaid balance behind it is a spending credential, and an assistant that can loop is an assistant that can loop expensively. Rate limits and a low starting balance are the cheap insurance.

Which SEO API should you buy?

For raw Google results at any volume, Serper, at $0.30 per 1,000 queries with 2,500 free to start and no monthly plan. Nothing else on this page undercuts it without a deposit gate, and paying $2.00 or $25.00 per 1,000 for the same ten blue links is a choice, not a requirement.

For mixed data needs on one account, DataForSEO, at $50 minimum deposit, no subscription and a balance that does not expire. It is not the cheapest SERP API and it does not need to be: the value is keyword volumes at $0.09 a batched request, backlinks at around $0.024 a summary and on-page audits at $0.00015 a page, all on the same credit.

If a monthly plan is fine and you want reports as well as data, SE Ranking, which publishes entry pricing from $50 for 250,000 credits where Semrush publishes none. Skip ScraperAPI and SerpApi for SERP-heavy work at $12.25 and $25.00 per 1,000 on their entry plans, unless the support or the legal cover is what you are buying. Treat any “$0.03 per 1,000” headline as a deposit size until you have checked what it costs to reach.

Once you have chosen

• WordPress MCP servers compared — the next job is getting the API output somewhere you can act on it; this covers which servers expose SEO and analytics tools.
• WordPress MCP security: what each setup exposes — an API key with a prepaid balance is a spending credential, and this walks through scoping the token before you connect a client.
• WordPress SEO plugins — ranking data is only useful if something on the site can act on it, which is the plugin layer.
• Rank Math vs Yoast SEO — if your pipeline writes titles and meta descriptions back into WordPress, these are the two fields’ owners.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use a SERP API for free?

Yes, within published limits. Serper offers 2,500 free queries with no card, Bright Data 5,000 free SERP records a month, ScraperAPI 5,000 credits across a seven-day trial, Oxylabs a trial of up to 2,000 results, SerpApi a permanent free plan of 250 searches a month, SearchApi 100 requests and Scrapingdog 200 credits. DataForSEO adds a $1 credit that has no expiry date.

How much does one Google SERP call cost?

Between $0.0003 and $0.025 depending on the vendor and the plan. Serper publishes $0.30 per 1,000 queries, which is $0.0003 a call. DataForSEO charges $0.0006 a SERP in its standard queue and $0.002 in Live mode, where one SERP means ten results. SerpApi’s entry plan works out at $0.025 a search, the dearest rate on this page.

Which is the cheapest SERP API?

Serper, at a published $0.30 per 1,000 queries with no deposit and no monthly plan. Apiserpent publishes $0.03 per 1,000, but that rate is unlocked by a one-time deposit of $500, and its default rate is $0.60 per 1,000. Among vendors publishing volume tiers, Scrapingdog’s $90 plan works out at $0.45 per 1,000 Google SERP Light calls.

Is DataForSEO worth it compared with Serper?

Only if you need more than search results. DataForSEO costs $2.00 per 1,000 SERP calls in Live mode against Serper’s $0.30, so for raw Google results it is 6.7 times the price. The same prepaid balance also buys keyword volumes, backlinks, Labs data, on-page audits and domain analytics, none of which Serper sells at all.

Does DataForSEO charge per keyword or per request?

Per request. A Google Ads search volume call costs $0.09 in Live mode whether it carries one keyword or a thousand, and one request accepts up to 1,000 keywords. So 1,000 keywords looked up one at a time cost $90.00, and the same 1,000 batched into a single request cost $0.09. The task-based queue is cheaper again at $0.06 a request.

Do I need a subscription to use an SEO API?

No. DataForSEO, Serper, Bright Data and Apiserpent all sell prepaid credit with no monthly plan, and DataForSEO states that a balance has no expiry date. SerpApi, SearchApi, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI and Scrapingdog sell monthly plans instead, and SE Ranking, Semrush and Ahrefs require a platform subscription before their API becomes available.