Brave Search vs Serper: which search API for your agent?
Compared on the same 170-query benchmark (judge κ=0.78). On list price, Serper is ~5.0× cheaper.
Per-class winner
Which of the two returns better results per query class (indicative — quality judged on 62 queries). For cost, see the cards above.
List prices as of 2026; actual cost varies by plan tier and volume. Notably: Serper drops to ~$0.30/1k at scale; Firecrawl 'Enhanced Mode' is ~5x for bot-protected sites. Comparisons use published list prices for a like-for-like baseline.
Pick Brave Search if… pick Serper if… or route both
Pick Brave Search when your queries are an independent web index with privacy. Pick Serper when your queries are cheap web and news links. On plain web/news lookups, a cheaper engine usually matches both — so don't hard-code one.
Don't pick one — route to the cheapest that clears your bar.
GroundRoute sends each query to the best-value engine and caches the result. You keep half of what the cache saves you, never more than going direct.