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unlob vs SerpAPI

SerpAPI is the mature multi-engine SERP API. At roughly $25 per 1,000 it is 62× unlob, and it is a scraping product rather than an index.

Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages

On the headline rate that is 63× — $25 per 1,000 against $0.40. 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$25
Per 1,000 comparable web searches — about ten results, no extraction, no summarisation. Log scale, because the spread is over an order of magnitude.
ProviderOwn index?$ / 1,000 queriesSource
SerpAPI

Approximately $25 per 1,000 searches on the Starter plan; the rate falls on higher-volume plans.

No

Scrapes Google, Bing, Baidu and others

$25SerpApi pricing
unlob — Build

$29 per month for 50,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.58This page
unlob — Scale

$199 per month for 500,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.40This page
Rates are the cheapest directly comparable web search call — roughly ten results, no extraction and no summarisation — because that is the only way a table across credit systems, token pricing and per-request pricing means anything. Where a vendor does not publish a flat per-1,000 rate they are omitted from this table and covered in full on the landscape page. Figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026.

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

SerpAPIunlob
PurposeReproduce 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 on Scale.
Freshness of the underlying dataWhatever 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.

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 requests 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.

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