The Best LLM Scraping APIs, Compared

Every AI visibility tool is built on top of a scraping API, and which one it sits on decides what the numbers mean. ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot have no public API for the interface real users see, so tracking what an answer engine says about your brand means driving the product itself. We build Elmo, an open-source AI visibility tracker, and we run five of these scraping providers side by side in production. This is what we've learned about the trade-offs.

Key takeaways

An LLM scraping API takes a prompt, drives a consumer AI product with it, and returns the generated answer as structured JSON, usually with the cited source URLs and sometimes the search queries the product ran behind the scenes.

That last part is why the category exists at all. You can approximate ChatGPT by calling gpt-5-mini with web search enabled, but it is significantly more expensive and the results will be different. This is because the ChatGPT product wraps the model in its own retrieval, ranking, and formatting layers, and those layers are what decide whether your brand gets named and which sources get linked. The model API answer and the product answer routinely disagree about both.

The same holds for Google. AI Mode and AI Overviews are Search features, not models, and there is no endpoint that returns them.

Not every provider reaches every surface. This is the first filter, because no amount of price advantage helps if the provider cannot see the surface you care about.

Vendor pricing pages quote per-request or per-credit rates that are hard to compare. Here they are normalised to one number: what it costs to track a single prompt for a month.

The assumption is five runs a day across two surfaces, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, which is 300 evaluations a month. That is Elmo's default cadence and a reasonable baseline for any tracker.

Two things this table hides, both of which change the answer at small scale.

Plan minimums beat unit prices. Oxylabs is the cheapest per run by a wide margin and has no pay-as-you-go option, so the entry price is the $49/mo Micro plan, which covers up to 98,000 results — around 325 tracked prompts. If you are tracking twenty prompts, you are paying $49 for $3 of scraping. BrightData, billing per record with no monthly minimum, is cheaper in absolute terms until you cross roughly 110 prompts, but you still have to put at least $10 in up front.

Credits are not requests. Cloro prices per credit, and each surface costs a different number: Perplexity 3, Gemini and Google AI Mode 4, Copilot and Google AI Overview 5, ChatGPT 7. One prompt on ChatGPT plus Google AI Mode is 11 credits a day, or about 1,650 a month. The $30 Lite plan's 37,500 credits therefore covers about 22 prompts, which works out closer to $1.30 each; the effective rate only drops to $0.65 on the larger plans.

Price and coverage are on every vendor's website. Success rate is not, and it is the number that actually determines whether your tracking data is usable.

A failed scrape is not the same kind of problem as a slow one. Retries may cost money and eventually give up, and a run that never completes leaves a gap in a time series that cannot be backfilled, because the answer that surface would have given yesterday no longer exists.

We run every provider against every surface it supports, several times a day, and publish every result including the failures. Here is what recent monitoring shows:

The aggregate hides the more useful finding. Broken out by surface:

Clean across all six surfaces, with good documentation and an API that is pleasant to integrate against. Requests go through an asynchronous task API that you poll, which also lets Cloro meter concurrency rather than holding a connection open. Failed requests are not charged.

It costs slightly more per run than BrightData and it is plan-based rather than pay-as-you-go, so the $30 floor stings on very small projects.

It is also the provider we put our own money behind: Cloro is the primary data source for Elmo Cloud, so the numbers in the table above are the same ones our paying customers depend on. Ahrefs, Scrunch, and Evertune run on it too.

A common default for web scraping in general, and reasonably so. Pay-as-you-go with no monthly minimum (although you have to pay $10 up front), a little cheaper per run than Cloro, and a battle-tested dataset collector for each major surface. Only Google AI Overview is a real weak point in terms of reliability.

Two trade-offs. It is slower than Cloro on identical surfaces, which does not matter for scheduled tracking and does if a user is waiting. And Google AI Overview is its weak spot at 71%, well below the 96–98% it manages everywhere else.

Cheapest per run of any provider here, by roughly 3x against BrightData. Requests go through an asynchronous Push-Pull API that avoids the connection timeouts of their realtime endpoint.

Three real limitations. It cannot reach Gemini or Copilot, so it is a non-starter if either matters to you. There is no pay-as-you-go tier, so you are committing $49/mo whether you use it or not. And it has been the least reliable provider we run, at 83%, with ChatGPT at 85% and Perplexity at 80% — the saving is real, and so is the missing fifth of your data.

The premium option, at roughly 5x BrightData, and the provider behind Profound, Athena, and AirOps. It is genuinely good at high-volume scraping and the API is well designed, and it covers all six surfaces.

At roughly 5x BrightData's price, 82% is hard to justify for a tracker running on a schedule, and the 68% on Google AI Mode is the worst single result in our monitoring. It is also the slowest provider by a wide margin, with a 58-second median and individual runs approaching 19 minutes.

The most flexible of the five, and the only one that fronts both scrapers and direct model APIs behind a single account. ChatGPT and Gemini come from its LLM Scraper, the two Google surfaces from SERP endpoints, and Perplexity from the LLM Responses API. It ties BrightData at 95%.

Pay-as-you-go with a $50 minimum top-up and no subscription, and the tiered queues give you a real cost lever if you can tolerate latency.

Elmo is open source, and the provider integrations are readable if you want to see exactly what each request does. Coverage in the table above is taken from those integrations rather than from vendor marketing.

The reliability and latency figures come from the same store that backs Elmo's status page, which runs real prompts against every provider and surface four times a day and records every result, pass or fail. The tables above cover 4,213 runs across 49 targets, de-duplicated so that retries within five minutes count once, which is the same aggregation the status page renders. Success rate is passing runs over total runs; latency is measured on passing runs only, since a failure's latency is time-to-error.

Pricing is taken from each vendor's public pricing pages as of August 2026 and normalised to the same workload. Vendors change prices; check before you commit.

Disclosure. Every provider link in this post is an affiliate link. If you sign up through one we get a small kickback at no extra cost to you, and it is one of the ways we fund work on Elmo, which is free and open source. It does not affect the ordering: we rank Cloro first because it is the provider we pay for ourselves, and the data behind that judgement is public on our status page. If you would rather support the project directly, please consider sponsoring Elmo on GitHub.