---
title: The Best LLM Scraping APIs, Compared
description: Cloro, SearchApi, Olostep, DataForSEO, Oxylabs, and BrightData compared on cost, coverage, and measured success rates from a tool that runs all six in production.
canonical: https://www.elmohq.com/blog/best-llm-scraping-apis
updated: "2026-11-04"
---
# The Best LLM Scraping APIs, Compared (/blog/best-llm-scraping-apis)
**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, 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](https://github.com/elmohq/elmo), an open-source AI visibility tracker, and we run six of these scraping providers side by side in production. This is what we've learned about the trade-offs.
**Key takeaways**
- Entry pricing spans about 5x for identical work. Tracking one prompt across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for a month costs roughly $0.45 on [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) or [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) and $2.15 on [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo)'s smallest plan.
- Headline per-run pricing is the wrong number to compare. If you're only tracking a handful of prompts, a free tier or a provider without a monthly minimum might be better. At scale, volume pricing reshuffles the order: [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo)'s largest plan is the cheapest per run here.
- Coverage is not uniform. [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog), [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo), [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo), and [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) reach all five surfaces; [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) and [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo) have no Copilot scraper.
- Reliability varies more than price does, and it is the variable nobody publishes. A failed scrape is a hole in your prompt's history that you cannot backfill. In October, success rates ranged from 97% to 61%.
- Google AI Overview is where providers split. [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo), [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo), and [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog) all cleared 97% on it; the other three were at 58% or below.
- Median latency ranges from 11 seconds to over a minute, and individual runs took up to nearly 20 minutes. It rarely matters for scheduled tracking but matters enormously for anything a user is waiting on.
## What an LLM scraping API actually does [#what-an-llm-scraping-api-actually-does]
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.
## Surface coverage [#surface-coverage]
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.
| Surface | Cloro | SearchApi | Olostep | DataForSEO | Oxylabs | BrightData |
|---|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| ChatGPT | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google AI Mode | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google AI Overview | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Gemini | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Not tested | ✅ |
| Copilot | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | – | – | ✅ |
Oxylabs now sells a Gemini scraper, but Elmo doesn't integrate it yet, so it has no reliability data below.
## Cost per tracked prompt [#cost-per-tracked-prompt]
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.
| Provider | Entry unit price | Per prompt/month | Cheapest option | Floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) | $1.50 / 1K results | ~$0.45 | ~$0.38 on the $500/mo plan | $30/mo plan (≈66 prompts) |
| [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) | $1.50 / 1K records | ~$0.45 | ~$0.39 on the $499/mo plan | Pay-as-you-go, 5K free records/mo |
| [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo) | $4 / 1K searches | ~$1.20 | ~$0.30 on the largest plan | $40/mo plan (≈33 prompts) |
| [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo) | $0.004 / result (live) | ~$1.20 | ~$0.36 in the standard queue | $50 minimum top-up |
| [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog) | $0.80 / 1K credits | ~$1.30 | ~$0.65 from the $100/mo plan | $30/mo plan (≈22 prompts) |
| [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo) | $1.80 / 1K credits | ~$2.15 | ~$0.60 on the $99/mo plan | $9/mo plan (≈4 prompts) |
Two things this table hides, both of which change the answer at small scale.
**Plan minimums beat unit prices.** [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) has no pay-as-you-go option, so the entry price is its $30/mo [Starter plan](https://oxylabs.io/pricing/web-scraper-api), which covers about 20,000 LLM scraper results, or around 66 tracked prompts. If you are tracking ten prompts, you are paying $30 for $4.50 of scraping. [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) bills per record with no monthly commitment, and its free 5,000 records a month cover about 16 prompts on this workload. [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo) is also pay-as-you-go, but you have to put at least $50 in up front, though the balance never expires.
**Credits are not requests.** [Cloro prices per credit](https://cloro.dev/pricing/), and each surface costs a different number: 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, at about $1.30 each; the rate halves to $0.65 from the $100 Hobby plan up. [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo) works the same way, at 5 credits for ChatGPT and 3 for every other surface, so its $9 Starter plan's 5,000 credits cover about four prompts.
## The variable nobody publishes: reliability [#the-variable-nobody-publishes-reliability]
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](https://www.elmohq.com/status) including the failures. Here is what October's monitoring shows:
| Provider | Success rate | Median latency | Slowest run |
|---|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog) | 97% | 40s | 5m40s |
| [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo) | 97% | 11s | 1m28s |
| [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo) | 96% | 32s | 19m39s |
| [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo) | 85% | 19s | 1m25s |
| [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) | 69% | 42s | 3m21s |
| [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) | 61% | 1m05s | 9m21s |
The aggregate hides the more useful finding. Broken out by surface:
| Surface | Cloro | SearchApi | Olostep | DataForSEO | Oxylabs | BrightData |
|---|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| ChatGPT | 98% | 92% | 99% | 98% | 82% | 89% |
| Google AI Mode | 100% | 100% | 97% | 87% | 84% | 71% |
| Google AI Overview | 97% | 100% | 99% | 58% | 26% | 28% |
| Gemini | 100% | 99% | 97% | 99% | – | 88% |
| Copilot | 92% | 100% | 91% | – | – | 0% |
## The six providers [#the-six-providers]
### Cloro (Recommended) [#cloro-recommended]
The most consistent provider across all five surfaces: 97% overall, and at least 97% everywhere except Copilot, where it managed 92%. It has good documentation and an API that is pleasant to integrate against. Requests go through an [asynchronous task API](https://cloro.dev/docs/) that you poll, which also lets Cloro meter concurrency rather than holding a connection open. Failed requests are not charged.
It is plan-based rather than pay-as-you-go, and the $30 Lite plan works out to about $1.30 per prompt, so it stings on very small projects. From the $100 Hobby plan up, the rate halves to about $0.65. There is also a free tier of 500 credits a month for testing.
It is also the provider we put our own money behind: [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog) 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.
Teams that want one provider to cover everything and would rather not think about it again.
### SearchApi [#searchapi]
Matched [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog) at 97% in October and was the fastest provider we run, with an 11-second median and no successful run over 1m28s. It was perfect on Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview, and Copilot; ChatGPT was its weakest surface at 92%.
It is also one of the simplest integrations here. One bearer API key and one synchronous endpoint serve every surface, selected by an `engine` parameter, so each run is a single request with no task queue to poll. The documentation is good, and ChatGPT results report whether the model searched the web.
[Pricing](https://www.searchapi.io/pricing) is flat per search regardless of surface, and you only pay for successful searches. The exception is Google AI Overview, which can take a second search when Google doesn't return the overview inline. At $4 per 1,000 searches on the $40/mo Developer plan, it costs about $1.20 per prompt, slightly less than [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog)'s entry plan; on the largest plans it falls to $1 per 1,000, the cheapest per run of any provider here. There is no pay-as-you-go tier, plans cap usage at 20% of your monthly searches in any hour, and sign-up includes 100 free requests.
Teams that want fast, synchronous results and predictable per-search pricing that gets cheaper at volume.
### Olostep [#olostep]
The provider behind Profound, Athena, and AirOps, and genuinely good at high-volume scraping with a well-designed API. It covers all five surfaces and hit 96% in October, including 99% on ChatGPT and Google AI Overview.
[Pricing](https://www.olostep.com/pricing) is credit-based, from a $9/mo Starter plan that covers only about four prompts at $2.15 each. The per-credit rate drops sharply on larger plans: the $99/mo Standard plan works out to about $0.60 per prompt.
Its 32-second median is competitive, but the tail is long. Individual runs approached 20 minutes, the slowest of any provider we run, which rules it out for anything a user is waiting on.
Large-scale batch scraping where throughput matters more than the slowest individual run.
### DataForSEO [#dataforseo]
The most flexible of the six, and the only one that fronts both scrapers and direct model APIs behind a single account. ChatGPT and Gemini come from its [LLM Scraper](https://docs.dataforseo.com/v3/ai_optimization-chat_gpt-llm_scraper-live-advanced/) and the two Google surfaces from SERP endpoints. It has no Copilot scraper.
ChatGPT and Gemini were near-perfect in October at 98% and 99%, with an overall median of 19 seconds. Google AI Overview pulled it down to 85% overall: only 58% of those runs succeeded, most failing with an internal error from DataForSEO's search backend.
Pay-as-you-go with a $50 minimum top-up and no subscription. Its queues give you a real cost lever: the standard queue costs less than a third of live mode, about $0.36 per prompt, if you can wait up to 45 minutes for results.
Anyone who wants pay-as-you-go pricing and the option to mix scraped and model-API data without a second vendor.
### Oxylabs [#oxylabs]
Tied with [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog) for the cheapest entry price, at about $0.45 per prompt. Oxylabs sells one subscription across all its products, from the $30/mo Starter plan, and new accounts get $5 of free credits. Requests go through an asynchronous Push-Pull API that avoids the connection timeouts of their realtime endpoint.
Three real limitations. It has no Copilot scraper, and its Gemini scraper is new enough that Elmo doesn't support it yet. There is no pay-as-you-go tier. And it was the second-least reliable provider we ran in October at 69%, with ChatGPT at 82% and Google AI Overview at 26%, where most jobs faulted on Oxylabs' side.
High volume on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, where the per-run saving compounds and you can tolerate gaps.
### BrightData [#brightdata]
A common default for web scraping in general. Pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 records with no monthly commitment, tied with [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) for the cheapest entry price, and a free tier of 5,000 records a month, which covers about 16 prompts on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
October was rough. It was the least reliable provider we ran at 61% and the slowest, with a 65-second median. ChatGPT and Gemini held up at 89% and 88%, but Google AI Mode fell to 71% and Google AI Overview to 28%. Copilot didn't return a single successful run: requests first hit a sign-in wall, then BrightData's dataset began rejecting collection requests entirely.
Trying out ChatGPT and Gemini scraping on the free tier before committing to a plan.
## How to choose [#how-to-choose]
- **What's the best overall?** [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog). It covers everything at a reasonable price and rarely fails. It's what we use for Elmo Cloud.
- **Need speed, or a low per-run price at volume?** [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo). It matched Cloro's reliability with the fastest median we measured, and its largest plans are the cheapest per run here.
- **Only tracking a handful of prompts?** [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog)'s free tier covers about 16 prompts a month, and [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo)'s pay-as-you-go balance never expires.
- **Need Copilot?** Use [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo), [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog), or [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo). [Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=2263&url_id=32) and [DataForSEO](https://try.dataforseo.com/elmo) don't scrape it, and [BrightData](https://get.brightdata.com/elmo?sid=blog)'s Copilot scraper didn't succeed once in October.
- **Need Google AI Overview?** Use [SearchApi](https://www.searchapi.io/?via=elmo), [Olostep](https://olostep.com/?ref=elmo), or [Cloro](https://cloro.dev?fpr=elmo&fp_sid=blog). Everyone else was at 58% or below.
## How we measured this [#how-we-measured-this]
Elmo is open source, and the [provider integrations](https://github.com/elmohq/elmo/tree/main/packages/lib/src/providers/registry) 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](https://www.elmohq.com/status), which runs real prompts against every provider and surface several times a day and records every result, pass or fail. The tables above cover 2,700 runs across 30 targets from October 5 to October 31, 2026, 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 November 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](https://www.elmohq.com/status). If you would rather support the project directly, please consider [sponsoring Elmo on GitHub](https://github.com/sponsors/elmohq).