Head to head
unlob vs SerpAPI
SerpAPI 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.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
On the headline rate that is 63× — $25 per 1,000 for SerpAPI’s Starter plan, its cheapest comparable mode, against $0.40per 1,000 searches. Other modes cost more; the pricing detail below lists them. Both figures are computed from the published plan tables rather than typed into this page, so they follow the vendors rather than drifting from them.
Price
- unlob$0.40
- SerpAPI$25
| 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 |
$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 |
When SerpAPI is the better choice
A comparison page that cannot name a scenario where the competitor wins is an advertisement. Here are the real ones.
Choose SerpAPI
- SERP features — knowledge panels, local packs, shopping results, People Also Ask — parsed and structured.
- Multiple engines behind one API.
- SEO and rank-tracking work, where the SERP itself is the product.
- A long track record and a mature ecosystem.
Choose unlob
- Cost: $0.40 against roughly $25 per 1,000.
- Agent-shaped data rather than result-page-shaped data.
- No dependency on continued scrapeability.
- Graph traversal, corroboration and coverage auditing.
The substantive differences
| SerpAPI | unlob | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Reproduce a search engine results page faithfully. | Return the passages an agent should read. |
| Price | ~$25 per 1,000 on Starter, falling with volume. | $0.40 per 1,000 searches on Scale (a search is one credit). |
| Freshness of the underlying data | Whatever Google shows right now — genuinely current. | Our crawl cadence, with both fetch and publication timestamps exposed so you can filter precisely. |
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.
- SerpAPI: SerpApi pricingread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
Should I use SerpAPI or unlob for an AI agent?
unlob, unless your agent’s job is specifically to analyse Google results. SerpAPI returns a result page you then have to fetch and clean; we return cleaned passages with trust signals, at about 1.6% of the price.
Check the claims yourself
The free tier is 10,000 credits a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.