Rank tracking API: live top-10 Google positions by country and device

Why a SERP API instead of a rank tracking SaaS

A rank tracking service sells you its schedule, its keyword limits and its reports. A SERP API sells you the raw material: the live top 10, or up to the top 100, for each keyword, with the schedule, the storage and the reporting in your hands.

That makes Serper.live the backend for a tracker you own: an agency dashboard, a module in your SEO product, a nightly job that writes positions into your database. No seats, no keyword quotas, no per-project plans; the bill is the number of searches multiplied by the market price.

The trade-off is plain: you write the scheduler and the storage, and each check is a real Google search that takes a few seconds. In return every stored position was fetched at a known time, for a known country and device, never from a cache.

How to get a keyword position

One request per keyword, country and device. The documentation has the full reference; the logic in your code is four steps, and the example below is the same request in curl, JavaScript and Python:

1. Send POST /v1/search with query, country and device, optionally language and limit. A live search usually returns in 2–3 seconds, the first one to a market after a pause takes longer: keep the client timeout at least 100 seconds and run checks from a queue.
2. Read organic[]. Each entry has position, title, url, domain and snippet, in the order Google shows them.
3. Find the entry whose domain matches the site you track and store its position with fetchedAt and requestId. Decide in advance whether a subdomain counts for the root domain, and ignore a leading www..
4. No match means outside the requested range for that check, the top 10 by default. Store that too: a keyword dropping out of the top 10 is exactly what a tracker exists to catch.

curl -s -X POST https://api.serper.live/v1/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sl_live_YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"best coffee shops","country":"DE","device":"desktop"}' \
  | jq '.organic[] | select(.domain == "example.com") | .position'

const response = await fetch('https://api.serper.live/v1/search', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
        Authorization: 'Bearer sl_live_YOUR_TOKEN',
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({ query: 'best coffee shops', country: 'DE', device: 'desktop' }),
    signal: AbortSignal.timeout(100000),
});
const { organic } = await response.json();
const hit = organic.find(row => row.domain === 'example.com');

console.log(hit ? hit.position : 'outside the top 10');

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.serper.live/v1/search",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer sl_live_YOUR_TOKEN"},
    json={"query": "best coffee shops", "country": "DE", "device": "desktop"},
    timeout=100,
)
organic = response.json()["organic"]
position = next((row["position"] for row in organic if row["domain"] == "example.com"), None)
print(position or "outside the top 10")

Markets and devices

Open markets right now: Germany, France, United Kingdom, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United States. Every market has a two-letter code you pass as country, a default Google interface language you can override with language, and both desktop and mobile at the same price.

New markets appear in GET /v1/countries and on the pricing page as they launch; your integration does not change.

What it costs

A check is one request: from $0.01 per keyword, per country, per device, which is $10.00 per 1,000 checks. There is no subscription, and credit is prepaid in USDT or USDC from $5 and never expires.

Example: 500 keywords checked once a day on one device come to about 15,000 requests a month. Multiply by the price of your market, or type the number into the calculator on the pricing page. Desktop and mobile double the count; two checks a day double it again.

Limits you should know

• A live search usually takes 2–3 seconds, the first one for a market after a pause longer. Plan for throughput: run checks concurrently from a queue with a client timeout of at least 100 seconds.
• Positions go as deep as you ask: limit 1–100, 10 by default. Every started block of 10 costs one market price, so a check of the top 30 reserves three prices and keeps only the blocks that received results; a site outside the requested range is reported as absent, not as a position.
• Nothing is cached. Two identical requests are two live searches and two charges; keep the results on your side.
• Results are specific to the country, device and language you send. Compare a position only with earlier checks made with the same three values.
• Google varies results between checks and over time. One live check is a sample; the trend over days is the signal to report.

Start with one keyword

Try it before you write code: the playground runs three live searches per IP address per day without an account, and its domain field shows the position straight away. Then create an account, add credit from $5 and send the first request from the quick start.