Top SERP Scraper APIs for Search Engine Scraping in 2024
Search engines are a valuable resource that provide numerous opportunities for businesses. Businesses extract information from search engines to make use of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) data. However, manually extracting massive amounts of data from search engines is tedious. SERP scraper APIs allow businesses to obtain SERP data from search engines automatically.
In this article, we explain what SERP scraper API is, how to use SERP APIs to get data and explore the best SERP scraper APIs along with their key capabilities.
Comparing the top SERP scraping APIs
In the below comparison table, we analyzed the service providers based on their pricing structure and key capabilities. For pricing factor, we considered the standard professional plan for each service.
Providers | Price/mo | Free Trial | Javascript Rendering* | Pagination Supported** | Data Export Formats*** |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bright Data | $500 | 7-day | ✅ | ✅ | JSON HTML |
OxyLabs | $499 | 7-day | ✅ | ✅ | JSON HTML |
Smartproxy | $250 | 3k free requests | ✅ | ✅ | JSON HTML |
Nimble | $600 | 7-day | ✅ | ✅ | JSON |
Aves API | $500 | 1k free requests | N/A | ✅ | JSON HTML |
DataForSEO | $600 | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | JSON HTML |
ScraperAPI | $299 | 7-day | ✅ | N/A | JSON |
SERP API | $130 | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | JSON |
Serpstack | $100 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | JSON CSV |
Table features:
Javascript rendering*
As of 2022, 98% of websites, including Amazon, The New York Times, and Twitter, use JavaScript on the client and server side. 1 However, not all SERP APIs support the rendering of javascript powered web pages. If you intend to extract data from a web page that relies on Javascript, such as those websites, you must use a SERP API that supports Javascript rendering.
Pagination**
Websites use pagination to divide their content into multiple pages to improve page performance and user experience (Figure 1). For example, Amazon has dozens of product listings, making it difficult and impossible to display all product data on a single page.
However, this makes it difficult for scraping bots to scrape paginated web pages. If you use a SERP scraper API that does not support pagination, your SERP API will stop extracting the data at the end of each product listing page. In this case, you must manually run scraper API on each product web page.
Figure 1: Representing the different formats of pagination
Data export formats***
The majority of SERP scraper APIs deliver scraped web data in JSON and HTML formats. SERP API services rarely support CSV and Excel files.
Price
Various SERP API features are available at an additional cost and pricing model. For example, if you intend to scrape:
- Website at a large scale
- Data from well-protected website (most website employ anti-scraping technologies)
- Data from a dynamic website
a simple pricing model would not suffice for your data extraction needs.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data’s SERP API allow users to retrieve real-time SERP data from all major search engines, including Google Maps, shopping, news, and images. Bright Data SERP scraping API provides access to real user search results, and extract the needed data from the search results page. The extracted data can include the URLs of the search results, the title and description of each result, thumbnails and other images.
Features:
- Offers users to collect SERP data from any country, city, state, and ZIP code.
- Provides auto-retry mechanism. It helps your scraper to overcome short-term problems such as server errors, proxy network failures, etc.
- Delivers the scraped search data in JSON or HTML format.
- Allows users to tailor the functionality of the SERP scraper API to their specific needs.
- Can be integrated into all third party web crawlers.
2. Oxylabs
Oxylabs SERP Scraper API obtains real-time SERP data, including both organic and paid results, in JSON format. The SERP scraping API provides access to localized paid ad results for different types of market research and competitive analysis.
Features:
- Offers coordinate-level targeting. You can specify the geo-location of the search results by providing coordinated for data extraction.
- Gathers raw HTML or structured data in JSON format.
- Provides auto-retry system for failed connection requests.
- Offers built-in proxy rotator for bypassing IP blocks.
3. Smartproxy
Smartproxy offers SERP scraping API for individuals and companies. It allows you to retrieve SERP data from in HTML and JSON. It provides 50M+ rotating and sticky IPs to overcome web scraping challenges.
Features:
- Enables users to obtain data in real-time or on-demand.
- Handles large-scale SERP scraping activities with its built-in 50M+ proxies.
- Supports both real-time integration and proxy-like integration.
- Handles pagination, making it suitable for bulk scraping.
4. Nimble
Nimble provides a SERP API employing NLP-based structuring algorithms to analyze web data using computer vision. This API incorporates integrated residential proxies and a proxy unblocker, allowing the extraction of data from websites that employ robust anti-scraping measures.
Features:
- Dedicated & rotated IP: Offers built-in dedicated residential proxies.
- Parsing templates: Allow users to extract specific snippets or data points from a website and offer built-in support for tables, JSON data output, and custom objects.
- Zip code level targeting: Extracts SERP data specific to a particular zip code area.
5. DataForSEO
DataForSEO SERP API offers features for extracting, and processing search engine data. It provides extended geo-targeting options, including city and coordinate-level targeting.
Features:
- Provides Live Page Screenshot endpoint (support HTML). You can take a screenshot of any SERP page.
- Enables users to collect SERP data in real-time.
6. SerpApi
SerpApi offers different API endpoints for Google, Yandex, Baidu and Bing. Search engine results API scrapes the SERP data for a specific search query. It scrapes different data points, including organic results, local results, and ad results.
Features:
- Handles pagination using page parameter. You need to provide the necessary pagination parameter in your request.
- Delivers results in JSON format.
- Google Images API allow you to filter image search.
- Mimics real user behavior to prevent detection as automated scrapers.
7. Serpstack
Serpstack API extracts Google SERP data in real-time, and delivers the extracted data in JSON or CSV format.
Features:
- Navigates to subsequent pages and collects data from the upcoming search pages.
- Offers dedicated location API, enabling you to specify the exact location you intend to send a request.
- Provides proxy network to bypass IP blocks and CAPTCHAs.
8. ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI offers Google SERP API with built-in proxy servers. It extracts localized JSON data from Google search results. ScraperAPI doesn’t provide API endpoints for other search engines except Google.
Features:
- Handles JSON data. You could retrieve the raw HTML data using standard API.
- Offers free plan with 5,000 API credits
- Ability to perform JavaScript rendering. It retrieves and returns JavaScript-heavy search result pages.
9. Aves API
Aves API scrapes Google SERP data in real-time. It handles IP blocks, manages proxies, and bypass CAPTCHA challenges.
Features:
- Delivers the scraped SERP data in JSON or HTML.
- Retrieves organic and ads results.
- Supports city-level targeting.
Sponsored
Instead of data collection, you can use ready-use dataset, reducing the chance of errors and inconsistencies in the data. Bright Data offers Google, Bing, and Yahoo datasets, including data points such as url, title, country, description and images.
What is search engine scraping?
Search engine scraping is the process of extracting web data such as URLs, descriptions, and titles from search engines. Search engine scraping is a form of web scraping that only gathers data from search engine results.
Data scraped from search engine results pages can be used in:
- Organic keyword tracking
- Lead generation
- Affiliate fraud
- Minimum advertised price (MAP) monitoring
- Price comparison
- Market research
What is the search engine (SERP) scraper API?
SERP API is a web scraping API (application programming interfaces) that automatically allows users to scrape search engine results for a given query.
How does SERP scraper API work?
The basic steps for web scraping with the SERP scraper API are as follows (Figure 2):
- Client makes a “http” connection request to the target web server in order to access its web content.
- SERP API receives client’s request and forwards it to the target search engine with “get” verb.
- The search engine responds to the connection request and provides the data requested in the “get” request.
- The SERP API receives the provided data and deliver it in JSON or HTML data format
Figure 2: Steps of SERP API scraping in a snapshot
What kind of data does SERP API extract?
The following are some examples of data that can be obtained from Google using the SERP API:
Images:
- Product images: Image data helps businesses to deal with brand infringement issues such as design and copyright.
News:
- Latest trends in various industries such as finance, real estate, etc.
Videos:
- Video ID
- Published Date
- Channel ID
- Video title and description
To learn how to scrape YouTube data, jump on Scraping YouTube Data: Legality, How-To & Use Cases.
Shopping:
- Product price/description data: allows retailers to analyze competitors.
- Competitor tracking: enables sellers to identify products that are trending upward or downward.
- Dynamic pricing: helps businesses adjust the prices of their products based on the prices of their competitors.
- Stock market analysis: allows businesses to extract the availability of competitors’ products in online stores.
Flights:
- Flight prices in real-time
- Total number of flights
- Airport information
Check out 5 Common Web Scraping Applications in the Travel Industry to learn how to use scraped travel data.
Finance:
- Stock market data
- Current financial news
- Company data
Transparency statement
AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies including Bright Data, Oxylabs and Smartproxy.
More on scraping APIs & web scrapers
- Web Scraping APIs: How-To, Capabilities & Top 10 Tools
- Web Scraping Tools: Data-driven Benchmarking
- Top 10 Proxy Service Providers of 2023 for Web Scraping
If you have more questions regarding SERP Scraper APIs, do not hesitate contacting us:
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