Comparisons
We sell one of the products discussed here, so read accordingly. Every page names at least one scenario where the competitor is the better choice, because a comparison that cannot do that is not worth reading.
Verified 7 October 2026·All figures from primary sources
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 searches | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Priced: Starter plan. $25 per 1,000 searches on the Starter plan ($25 a month for 1,000), falling to about $1.96 per 1,000 on the largest Cloud plan. | No Scrapes Google, Bing, Baidu and others | $25 | SerpApi pricing |
Priced: search queries on Gemini 3.x. $14 per 1,000 search queries on Gemini 3.x models after 5,000 free search requests a month (paid tier, shared across Gemini 3.x), plus model token charges. One prompt can trigger several billed queries. Gemini 2.5 models keep the older scheme: $35 per 1,000 grounded prompts after 1,500 free a day. | Yes Google's index | $14 | Gemini API pricing |
Priced: Grounding with Bing Search transactions (one per tool call). $14 per 1,000 transactions, counted per tool call within an agent run, with model costs billed separately. Available only inside Azure AI Foundry Agent Service or as a web knowledge source in Azure AI Search, and the raw results are not returned to the developer. | Yes Bing index, via Azure AI Foundry | $14 | Grounding with Bing Search |
TavilyAcquired Priced: basic search, pay as you go. Credit-based at $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. A basic search is 1 credit (~$8 per 1,000), an advanced search 2 credits (~$16 per 1,000), and a research request 4 to 250 credits. Fast and ultra-fast searches are also 1 credit; monthly plans bring the effective rate down to $5 per 1,000 at 100,000 credits ($500 a month). | No No publicly documented independent web index | $8 | Tavily pricing |
Priced: Search plan. Search is $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan is $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens. | Yes 40B+ pages, no Google or Bing dependency | $5 | Brave Search API pricing |
Priced: standard-depth search. $5 per 1,000 standard-depth searches returning results ($0.005 a call); $6 per 1,000 with a sourced answer, and $50 per 1,000 at deep depth. | Partial Own retrieval layer over partner and web sources | $5 | Linkup pricing |
Priced: paid queries (existing customers only). $5 per 1,000 queries after 100 free a day, up to 10,000 queries a day — for existing customers only. The API is closed to new customers and is discontinued on 1 January 2027. | Yes Google's index, via Programmable Search Engine | $5 | Custom Search JSON API pricing |
Priced: Instant search. Instant search is $4 per 1,000 requests (up to 10 results); Fast and Auto are $7 per 1,000, and the Deep modes $12 to $15. Results beyond 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, and AI summaries $1 per 1,000 pages — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline. | Yes Proprietary AI-native semantic index | $4 | Exa pricing |
Priced: SERP API, pay as you go. The SERP API returns scraped search-engine results pages at $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go; the $499-a-month Scale plan includes 380,000 requests, then $1.30 per 1,000. Proxy and browser products are priced per GB. | No Proxy, unblocking and scraping infrastructure | $1.50 | Bright Data SERP API pricing |
Priced: Turbo processor. The Turbo and Fast search processors are $1 per 1,000; Basic and Advanced are both $5 per 1,000. The Task API, which is what most agent workloads actually use, runs $5 to $2,400 per 1,000 depending on processor. | Yes Proprietary web index and retrieval infrastructure | $1 | Parallel pricing |
Priced: Starter credit pack. $1 per 1,000 on the Starter credit pack, falling to $0.30 per 1,000 on the largest pack. Prepaid credits, valid for six months. | No Google SERP wrapper | $1 | Serper pricing |
Priced: Search API with Fast Search. The Search API is $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 with Fast Search, with no token charges (up to 20 results, 10 by default). Sonar Chat Completions support ended on 27 September 2026 and requests are moving to the Agent API; Sonar charged $5 to $12 per 1,000 by search context size plus $1/$1 per million tokens, and Sonar Pro $6 to $14 plus $3/$15. | Yes Perplexity index | $1 | Perplexity API pricing |
Priced: Standard queue (asynchronous). $0.60 per 1,000 SERPs (10 results each) in the Standard queue, which is asynchronous: you post a task and collect the result later. Priority queue is $1.20 per 1,000 and real-time Live mode $2. Pay as you go, with a $50 minimum payment. | No SERP data collection at scale | $0.60 | DataForSEO SERP API pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
Before you compare
Which kind of search API do you need?
Comparing across categories on price is how teams end up rebuilding six months later. Settle the category first; four of these five answers are not us.
Pick the branch that describes you.
- Ifyou need Google's own ranking, exactly as a person would see it
Nothing else returns Google’s results. They also inherit the deprecation and pricing risk of the engine behind them.
- Ifyou already build on Gemini or Azure and want nothing extra to integrate
Nothing to wire up if you are already there; no control over the index or the price if you are not.
- Ifyou already have the URLs and need clean page text
Essential in most stacks, and they need something to hand them the URLs.
- Ifyou want the provider to research the question and write the answer
You buy the provider’s judgement, on its models, priced per task.
- Ifyour own model should reason over evidence that carries provenance, independence and a receipt
The evidence layer beneath whichever model you run, from an index we own.
unlob compared with
unlob vs Parallel Search
$1/1kTwo own-index, agent-first search APIs with the same founding thesis: Parallel is far better funded, and unlob is cheaper and traverses a coverage graph.
unlob vs Exa
$4/1kExa is the best-funded neural search API in the category at a $2.2B valuation. unlob is 10× cheaper than Exa’s Instant search and adds graph traversal and coverage auditing.
unlob vs the Brave Search API
$5/1kBrave runs a genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages. It ended its free tier in February 2026 and its Search plan costs 13× as much per request.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
unlob vs Tavily
$8/1kTavily pioneered LLM-shaped search responses and was acquired by Nebius in 2026; it does not own an index, and unlob does, at a fraction of the price.
Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026
unlob vs Grounding with Google Search
$14/1kGoogle’s first-party grounding gives Gemini the best index in the world at $14 per 1,000 search queries — 35× unlob, and only usable from Gemini.
unlob vs Perplexity
$1/1kPerplexity sells raw search over its own index at $1 per 1,000 with Fast Search, and answers through its Agent API. unlob sells what a result list leaves out: independence, coverage receipts and a status.
unlob vs Serper
$1/1kSerper is the cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. It is also a Google SERP wrapper, with everything that implies.
unlob vs SerpAPI
$25/1kSerpAPI is the mature multi-engine SERP API. At roughly $25 per 1,000 it is 63× unlob, and it is a scraping product rather than an index.
unlob vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns URLs into clean markdown. unlob finds the URLs. They are complements more often than alternatives.
unlob vs Linkup
$5/1kLinkup is a well-regarded grounding API with a sub-second tier and native parallel search. unlob owns its index and publishes a flat rate.
unlob vs Valyu
Valyu spans web plus licensed proprietary corpora with publisher attribution. unlob is open-web only, at a published flat rate.
unlob vs Diffbot
Diffbot runs an independent commercial crawl and a structured Knowledge Graph of entities; unlob indexes passages and exposes a coverage graph over them.
unlob vs Bright Data
$1.50/1kBright Data is proxy and unblocking infrastructure at industrial scale. unlob is a search index. Different layers of the stack.
unlob vs DataForSEO
$0.60/1kDataForSEO is the cheapest SERP data in the market at roughly $0.60–1 per 1,000. It is built for SEO tooling, not for agents.
unlob vs Google Custom Search JSON API
$5/1kThe Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and Google discontinues it on 1 January 2027. Existing customers get real Google results at $5 per 1,000, with a hard 10,000-per-day ceiling.
Closed to new customers; Google discontinues it on 1 January 2027 and points site search to Vertex AI Search
unlob vs Grounding with Bing Search
$14/1kMicrosoft’s designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.
unlob vs the OpenAI web search tool
OpenAI’s built-in search tool needs no integration if you are already on the Responses API — and gives you no control over retrieval.
unlob vs Jina Reader
Jina Reader converts a URL to markdown with a URL prefix. unlob finds which URLs matter and returns their text.
unlob vs Mojeek
Mojeek has crawled and indexed the web independently since 2004. unlob is a newer index built specifically for agent retrieval.
Comparisons we are not part of
These questions get asked constantly and answered badly, usually by one of the participants. We have no stake in the outcome of any of them.
Exa vs Parallel Search
The two best-funded own-index search APIs, compared on price, product surface, free tier and funding, with a dated source for every figure.
Exa vs Tavily
Neural search over a proprietary index against an LLM-shaped retrieval layer, one of which was acquired in February 2026.
Brave Search API vs Exa
Two independent indexes with different design targets: a conventional web search API against a neural one built for AI.
Tavily vs Linkup
Two grounding APIs for LLMs, one now owned by Nebius and one independently funded. Neither owns the index its answers are drawn from.
Serper vs SerpAPI
Two Google SERP APIs reselling the same results, roughly twenty-five times apart on price. What the expensive one buys you is SERP feature coverage.
Or skip the reading
10,000 free credits a month, no card. Run your own queries against both and decide from results rather than tables.
Evaluating for a team or at volume? Send a workload brief or write to hello@unlob.com — a person replies.