A paid or free endpoint that returns search data as structured JSON instead of a dashboard: search results, keyword volumes, backlinks, rankings or crawl data. You send a request, you get rows back, and what you do with them is up to you. It is how agencies build their own reporting and how SEO products get their data.

Which provider is best?

It depends on what you are billed for. DataForSEO is the usual answer for broad coverage at per-request pricing with no monthly floor. Ahrefs has the deepest backlink index. SE Ranking is the best value all-rounder and one of the few carrying AI search data. Google Search Console is the best free option and should be wired up before you pay for anything.

What is the cheapest option?

Among paid providers, DataForSEO starts at $0.0006 per SERP on its Standard queue, and Serper runs roughly $0.30 to $1 per 1,000 searches. Both beat subscription providers by an order of magnitude at volume. Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are free outright, though they only report on your own properties.

Is there a free SEO API?

Yes. The Google Search Console API and the PageSpeed Insights API are both free with no paid tier, and Moz has a free 50-row monthly allowance. Several commercial providers also ship trial credits large enough to build a proof of concept, including SE Ranking at 100,000 credits and Serper at 2,500 free searches.

Can I build a commercial product on one?

Check the licence first, because it varies sharply. Some providers explicitly prohibit reselling or repackaging their data in a third-party product and have suspended accounts for it. Others treat that as their core market, which is why so much SEO tooling is built on them. Buying access licenses you to use the data, not to redistribute it.

Do I need a developer?

For most providers, yes, or at least someone comfortable with n8n, Make or a spreadsheet script. These return raw rows, not reports, and practitioners consistently warn that a non-technical team ends up spending more than a subscription tool would have cost. A handful now ship MCP servers, which lets an AI client query the data directly and lowers that bar considerably.

Which ones return AI Overview data?

SE Ranking carries AI Overview and LLM search results as a first-class dataset, DataForSEO exposes them through its SERP and AI Optimization endpoints, and Scrapingdog detects AI Overview presence on its Google Search endpoint. Coverage is still thin across the market, so it narrows a shortlist quickly.

How is usage normally billed?

Four models, and they are not comparable at face value. Pay as you go bills per request with no floor. Credit packs have you prepay a balance that different endpoints draw down at different rates. Subscriptions charge a fixed monthly fee whether you use it or not. Free means quota-limited but costless. Normalise to cost per useful row before comparing any two rate cards.

The directory

SEO APIs, compared on what they actually cost

49 providers, researched from their own pricing and documentation pages rather than their marketing. What each request costs, which datasets you get, what the rate limits are, and where the licence stops you reselling the output.

Browse the directory Read our featured pick

49: providers reviewed
38: usable free
7: with no monthly floor
17: return AI search data

The directory

Every provider, filtered by how it bills you

Filters are on the left. Billing model is the one worth starting with, because it decides your bill far more than the headline rate does.

Every one of the SEO APIs below was checked against its own pricing and documentation pages, not a comparison post. Where a provider publishes no public rate, the card says so rather than guessing, and the entry price shown is the cheapest published route to real data rather than a headline discount.

Showing 15 of 49 APIs

DataForSEO

Featured

Best for pay-as-you-go volume

Twelve pay-as-you-go APIs covering SERPs, keywords, backlinks, on-page and AI search. No subscription, no monthly minimum, and the per-request rates are the lowest of any full-stack provider here.

SERP data from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Naver, YouTube and Seznam
Keyword volume and CPC sourced from the Google Ads API
Backlink index with per-row billing

SERP results
Keywords & search volume
Backlinks

$0.0006 per SERPPay as you go

Visit DataForSEO Read the review

Ahrefs API

Best backlink data

Programmatic access to the backlink index most SEOs treat as the reference point. The $500 standalone API tier is gone: access now starts on the $129 Lite plan and is metered in units.

Backlink index built on one of the web's largest crawlers
Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker endpoints
Brand Radar endpoints for AI answer visibility

Backlinks
Keywords & search volume
Competitor & traffic

$129/moSubscription · Credit packs

Visit Ahrefs API Read the review

Semrush API

Best for competitor research

Keyword, domain and traffic analytics from one of the two best-known SEO datasets, now owned by Adobe. Access needs the top self-serve plan, and API units are bought on top of it.

Domain and keyword analytics across a large database estate
Trends API for competitor traffic and clickstream estimates
Projects API for your own site audit and position tracking

Keywords & search volume
Backlinks
Competitor & traffic

$549/moSubscription · Credit packs

Visit Semrush API Read the review

Google Search Console API

Best free first-party data

Google's own record of your search performance, first-party and free. Its real value is not the price but the 25,000 rows per request it returns, against the 1,000 the interface will show you.

Search Analytics: clicks, impressions, CTR and position
25,000 rows per request against the UI's 1,000
URL Inspection API for indexing and rendering status

Rank tracking
Keywords & search volume
Technical & on-page

FreeFree

Visit Google Search Console API Read the review

SE Ranking API

Best value at mid volume

Six API products covering keywords, backlinks, domains, audits and AI visibility, sold four different ways. Pay-as-you-go credits that never expire.

Keyword, Backlinks, Domain Analysis and Website Audit APIs
AI Visibility API for brand presence across LLM engines
Project API to manage rank tracking and audits at scale

Keywords & search volume
Backlinks
Competitor & traffic

45/moPay as you go · Credit packs · Subscription

Visit SE Ranking API Read the review

SerpApi

Best documented SERP API

The most thoroughly documented SERP API, covering Google AI Mode and AI Overviews alongside dozens of engines. Uniquely, it indemnifies US scraping claims up to $2m, and is itself in court with Google.

Dozens of engines including Google AI Mode and AI Overview
Legal indemnification up to $2m on Production and above
Throughput measured per hour, not per second

SERP results
Local & maps
Content & SERP features

$25/moSubscription

Visit SerpApi Read the review

Serper

Cheapest credible SERP data

Prepaid Google search credits with sub-two-second responses and no subscription. The cheapest credible SERP data here at volume, though the entry rate is $1 per 1,000, not the headline $0.30.

Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar
Prepaid credit packs, no monthly commitment
Credits deducted only on successful responses

SERP results
Local & maps
Content & SERP features

$1.00 per 1,000Credit packs · Pay as you go

Visit Serper Read the review

Bright Data SERP API

Best for hard geotargeting

SERP data on top of the largest commercial proxy network, with unlimited concurrency and seven search engines. You pay only for successful requests, and there is no indemnity.

Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo and Naver
Unlimited concurrency, sub-second responses claimed
Proxy management, CAPTCHA solving and rendering included

SERP results
Local & maps
Content & SERP features

$1.00 per 1,000Pay as you go · Subscription

Visit Bright Data SERP API Read the review

Oxylabs SERP Scraper API

Best structured SERP parsing

Structured SERP parsing on a monthly plan, priced in dollars per 1,000 results for each target site. Google is $1.00 per 1,000 results, Amazon half that, everything else more.

Per-target pricing: Amazon, Google and other rated separately
Monthly plans from $49 with a results allowance
JavaScript rendering priced as a separate, higher rate

SERP results
Local & maps
Content & SERP features

$49/moSubscription · Credit packs

Visit Oxylabs SERP Scraper API Read the review

Moz Links API

Best for Domain Authority

The only way to get Domain Authority programmatically, which is the whole argument. Row-based plans from $20, and the entry tier stops rather than bills when you run out.

Domain Authority and Page Authority, the industry's default proxy metrics
Brand Authority as a second proprietary score
Row-based pricing from 3,000 to 500,000 a month

Backlinks
Competitor & traffic

$20/moSubscription

Visit Moz Links API Read the review

ValueSERP

Best bulk SERP value

Monthly credit packs for Google SERPs with rate limits measured per minute rather than per second. Cheap at volume, and the entry rate is $2.00 per 1,000, not the advertised $0.50.

Real-time Google SERPs in JSON, HTML or CSV
Rate limits from 250 to 1,500 requests a minute
Follows links from the initial SERP at no extra cost

SERP results
Local & maps
Content & SERP features

$2.00 per 1,000Subscription · Credit packs · Pay as you go

Visit ValueSERP Read the review

ScrapingBee

Best SERP plus page scraping

General-purpose scraping with a Google Search API attached, priced in credits by how much machinery a request needs. Auto-Mode charges only for the configuration that worked, and nothing at all if none did.

One API for SERPs, page scraping and screenshots
Auto-Mode: pays only for the configuration that succeeded
Credit cost scales with proxy and rendering, 1 to 75

SERP results
Technical & on-page
Content & SERP features

$19/moSubscription · Credit packs

Visit ScrapingBee Read the review

Serpstat API

Best for SERP crawling on a budget

Twelve API chapters covering domains, keywords, backlinks, audits and SERP crawling with AI Overview scraping. JSON-RPC rather than REST, and there is no sandbox.

Domain, keyword, URL and backlink analysis methods
SERP Crawling with AI Overview scraping
Rank Tracker, Site Audit and Project Management methods

Keywords & search volume
Backlinks
Competitor & traffic

$100/moSubscription · Credit packs

Visit Serpstat API Read the review

Apify

Best for scraping anything without a dataset

A scraping platform and a store of more than 66,000 ready-made Actors, billed in compute units on top of a monthly plan. You are buying infrastructure and a marketplace, not a dataset.

66,000+ prebuilt Actors for SERPs, maps, social and marketplaces
Run, schedule and chain Actors over a REST API
Datasets, key-value stores and request queues as managed storage

SERP results
Competitor & traffic
Content & SERP features

$19/moSubscription · Credit packs · Pay as you go

Visit Apify Read the review

Profound

Best for answer-engine visibility at enterprise scale

Answer-engine visibility, AI crawler analytics and marketing agents in one platform. The API is real and well documented, and it is Enterprise-only: neither self-serve plan includes it.

Answer Engine Insights across the major LLM platforms
Agent Analytics from your own CDN and server logs
Raw per-execution prompt, answer, mention and citation rows

AI search & LLM visibility
Competitor & traffic
Content & SERP features

$99/moSubscription

Visit Profound Read the review

Side by side

The six most-used, compared

Our featured pick leads. Every value below derives from the same fields as the cards above, so the table cannot disagree with them.

The APIs for enterprise SEO teams cluster at the top of this table, and they charge for depth rather than breadth: a proprietary crawl, a legal position, or a support contract. The cheaper providers are not returning worse organic results, they are returning fewer of the things around them.

Compare

Entry price

$0.0006 per SERP

$129/mo

$549/mo

45/mo

$25/mo

$1.00 per 1,000

Billing

Pay as you go

Subscription, Credit packs

Pay as you go, Credit packs, Subscription

Subscription

Credit packs, Pay as you go

Free tier

Free sandbox + trial credit on signup

Free test queries without a paid plan

Free plan for the interface only. No API allowance.

14-day trial with 100,000 credits, no card required

250 searches per month

2,500 free queries, no card

SERP data

Keyword volume

Backlinks

Rank tracking

Technical / on-page

AI search data

MCP server

Auth

Basic auth (Base64 login:password)

Bearer token

API key (OAuth 2.0 on parts of v4)

API key

Entry prices are the cheapest published route to real data, read from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Rates move, so confirm before you budget.

Buyer's guide

How to choose between SEO APIs

Six things that decide whether a provider fits, in the order they usually bite. Every figure below is computed from the directory above.

Billing model decides the bill, not the rate card

The single most expensive mistake here is comparing published rates without normalising the unit behind them. One provider bills per SERP page, another per result, another per successful search, another wraps everything in credits whose cost varies by endpoint. The same workload can differ by an order of magnitude between two providers whose pricing pages look comparable.

Of the 49 providers listed, 10 bill purely per request, 42 require a monthly subscription, and 7 have no monthly floor at all. If your volume is uneven, that last number is the one that matters: a subscription charges the same in a quiet month.

What it costs to start

The spread is wider than most people expect. 38 of the 49 can be used at zero cost, either free outright or with a free tier large enough to build against. At the other end, several require four-figure monthly commitments before returning a single row.

Select a band to see which of the 49 providers sit in it. Several span more than one, so the counts add up to more than 49.

Coverage is uneven, and not where you would guess

SERP data is close to a commodity: 25 of 49 providers return it, and for plain organic results they largely agree. Backlinks are the opposite. Only 11 carry a link index, because building one means funding a web-scale crawler, which is exactly why the providers that have one charge what they do.

The newest gap is AI search. Just 17 of the 49 currently return AI Overview or LLM visibility data, so if that is on your reporting roadmap it narrows the shortlist fast.

Free does not mean limited

Two of the most useful APIs in this directory cost nothing. The Search Console API is the only authoritative source for how your own site performs in Google, and the PageSpeed Insights API returns both Lighthouse scores and real Core Web Vitals field data on a 25,000 request daily quota.

Wire both up before paying for anything. Most commercial APIs here are best understood as filling the gap those two leave, which is competitor visibility.

Read the licence before you build a product

Buying API access is not the same as buying the data. Several providers explicitly prohibit reselling or repackaging their output inside a third-party product, and accounts have been suspended for it. Others treat exactly that use case as their core market, which is why so much commercial SEO tooling runs on them.

If what you are building is internal, this rarely matters. If it is customer-facing, it decides your shortlist before price does.

Check what the data has to become

A cheap API that returns rows is only cheap if someone on your team turns those rows into an answer. The providers charging a premium are largely charging for interpretation: clustering, intent mapping, competitor gaps and a report a client can read without a translator.

That calculation is shifting. 24 of these providers now ship a Model Context Protocol server, which lets an AI client query the data directly and closes some of the gap between raw rows and a usable answer. Budget for the layer you are no longer buying, then compare total cost rather than unit price.

Straight from Reddit

What practitioners actually say

Real, unedited comments from r/SEO, r/TechSEO, r/bigseo, r/SaaS and r/n8n on cost, data quality and what breaks in production. Every card links to the original.

Picking one

“I'd start with two filters before I even look at "best." First, unit semantics. DataForSEO bills per SERP page, Bright Data and Oxylabs talk in results, SerpApi is per successful search, ScraperAPI wraps things in credits, and Serperdev looks cheap until you map credits to your real workload. If you skip that step, you're comparing pricing pages, not actual spend.”

u/ian_k93 in r/WebScrapingInsiderReddit

Picking one

“I still think a lot of teams buy the wrong category. The actual stakeholder question is often "is demand going up?" or "how is our site doing?" and suddenly someone is evaluating SERP APIs when they needed Trends or Search Console. "Google data" gets used like it's one thing, and then reporting inherits the confusion.”

u/Bigrob1055 in r/WebScrapingInsiderReddit

Picking one

“Make sure you check the rate limits. Even the best seo api providers will throttle you if your app's architecture isn't optimized for batching. Ask your dev team if they need real-time data or if a 24-hour refresh is okay.”

u/AlexAleydo in r/SEO_LLMReddit

Picking one

“"Easy integration" and "easy to operate" are not the same thing.”

u/ian_k93 in r/WebScrapingInsiderReddit

Picking one

“The internal adoption angle gets missed too. Even if engineering picks the right provider, the output still has to become something the rest of the org can use. If the schema is inconsistent or the caveats are too complicated, people stop trusting the dashboard and go back to manual spot checks.”

u/Direct_Push3680 in r/WebScrapingInsiderReddit

Picking one

“It's good, but unless you're a developer, you'll likely end up spending more than with the other tools you mentioned. Even worse, you might not find it useful at all. It's raw data, nothing else, which means you'll need to know how to extract it for your purposes, what to look for, how to create projects and diagrams, etc.”

u/AbleInvestment2866 in r/SEOReddit

Comments are quoted from public Reddit threads and belong to their authors. Opinions are their own, shared here for context, not endorsements.

Use cases

What teams actually build

Each tile filters the directory to the providers that carry the dataset it needs.

Most SEO agency APIs get bought for one job and then quietly absorb four more. Client rank reporting is almost always the trigger; keyword research, content briefs and link qualification follow once the pipeline exists and the marginal cost of another query is a fraction of a cent.

Client rank reporting

Nightly rankings for every client keyword, written into your own dashboard instead of exported from someone else's. The most common reason an agency goes programmatic in the first place.

See the 20

Keyword research at scale

Volume, CPC and difficulty for tens of thousands of terms at once, which is the only practical way to plan a programmatic content build or size a new market.

See the 18

AI search visibility

Tracking whether you appear in AI Overviews and LLM answers. Newer, less covered, and the fastest-moving reporting requirement most teams now have.

See the 17

Link prospecting

Qualifying thousands of link targets by authority, topical relevance and spam signals before anyone writes an outreach email.

See the 11

Content briefs from live SERPs

Pulling the current top ten for a target term, extracting what ranks and why, and feeding that into a brief or a model prompt automatically.

See the 25

Technical health monitoring

Scheduled crawls and Core Web Vitals checks that alert you when something regresses, rather than being discovered in next quarter's audit.

See the 23

Methodology

How we picked, and what we checked

This is a shortlist, not a census. We started from the providers that actually come up when engineering and SEO teams pick a data source, then cut it to the top SEO APIs for data integration work: the ones with public documentation, a published rate card and an endpoint you can call today.

Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, not from a comparison article. The strongest APIs for SEO work change their rates more often than their marketing, so treat every figure as a starting point for your own check rather than a quote.

Where a provider publishes no public rate, we say so. Where a Reddit comment reports a real bill, it is quoted as a user report and attributed, never restated as vendor pricing.

No affiliate links and no paid placements. Nobody here pays to be listed, to be featured, or to rank higher in the directory. Outbound links carry nofollow and we earn nothing if you sign up.

No invented ratings. We publish no star rating and no aggregate score. The scorecard on our featured review is an editorial read across six dimensions, and it stays out of the page's structured data. Third-party scores from G2 and Capterra are shown with a source, a count and the date we read them.

Reddit is a signal, not a fact. Community sentiment is quoted for context and linked back to the original comment. Where a claim contradicted the vendor's published terms, we checked the terms.

FAQ

Questions we get

What is an SEO API?
A paid or free endpoint that returns search data as structured JSON instead of a dashboard: search results, keyword volumes, backlinks, rankings or crawl data. You send a request, you get rows back, and what you do with them is up to you. It is how agencies build their own reporting and how SEO products get their data.
Which provider is best?
It depends on what you are billed for. DataForSEO is the usual answer for broad coverage at per-request pricing with no monthly floor. Ahrefs has the deepest backlink index. SE Ranking is the best value all-rounder and one of the few carrying AI search data. Google Search Console is the best free option and should be wired up before you pay for anything.
What is the cheapest option?
Among paid providers, DataForSEO starts at $0.0006 per SERP on its Standard queue, and Serper runs roughly $0.30 to $1 per 1,000 searches. Both beat subscription providers by an order of magnitude at volume. Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are free outright, though they only report on your own properties.
Is there a free SEO API?
Yes. The Google Search Console API and the PageSpeed Insights API are both free with no paid tier, and Moz has a free 50-row monthly allowance. Several commercial providers also ship trial credits large enough to build a proof of concept, including SE Ranking at 100,000 credits and Serper at 2,500 free searches.
Can I build a commercial product on one?
Check the licence first, because it varies sharply. Some providers explicitly prohibit reselling or repackaging their data in a third-party product and have suspended accounts for it. Others treat that as their core market, which is why so much SEO tooling is built on them. Buying access licenses you to use the data, not to redistribute it.
Do I need a developer?
For most providers, yes, or at least someone comfortable with n8n, Make or a spreadsheet script. These return raw rows, not reports, and practitioners consistently warn that a non-technical team ends up spending more than a subscription tool would have cost. A handful now ship MCP servers, which lets an AI client query the data directly and lowers that bar considerably.
Which ones return AI Overview data?
SE Ranking carries AI Overview and LLM search results as a first-class dataset, DataForSEO exposes them through its SERP and AI Optimization endpoints, and Scrapingdog detects AI Overview presence on its Google Search endpoint. Coverage is still thin across the market, so it narrows a shortlist quickly.
How is usage normally billed?
Four models, and they are not comparable at face value. Pay as you go bills per request with no floor. Credit packs have you prepay a balance that different endpoints draw down at different rates. Subscriptions charge a fixed monthly fee whether you use it or not. Free means quota-limited but costless. Normalise to cost per useful row before comparing any two rate cards.

Want the pipeline, not just the provider?

Picking the API is the easy half. We build the layer on top: the rank tracking, the keyword pipelines, the AI search reporting and the automations that turn rows into something a client reads. Usually live in weeks, not quarters.

Book a call See our AI visibility tracker