Quickstart
Grab a free key from your dashboard. You get 3,000 credits a month, no card. Send the key as an x-api-key header and hit one endpoint.
You pay one credit per successful search, however many results come back. Maps is the one exception, it bills one credit per business returned. Empty searches are free, and the credits you buy never expire. Every response is the same stable JSON shape, and it matches serper's, so you can point existing code at us without rewriting your parser.
The API
One endpoint, one parameter that picks the Google surface. Change type, keep everything else the same.
The surfaces you can ask for:
| type | what you get |
|---|---|
web | Google web search: organic results, people-also-ask, related searches |
maps | Local businesses: name, address, phone, website, rating, review count |
places | A single place in a lean, serper-exact shape |
news | Google News: title, source, date, and a real hero image |
shopping | Google Shopping products with prices and sellers |
images | Google Images results |
videos | Google Videos with direct thumbnails |
scholar | Google Scholar papers and citations |
patents | Google Patents results |
autocomplete | Google autocomplete suggestions for a query |
webpage | Any URL as clean text, metadata, and JSON-LD, ready to feed an AI (RAG) |
reviews | Google reviews for a business, with sorting and pagination |
Common parameters
| param | what it does |
|---|---|
q | Your search query. Required for most surfaces. |
gl | Country code, like us or gb. |
hl | Language code, like en. |
location | Where to search from, for maps and places, like Miami, FL. |
limit | For type=maps: how many businesses to return. Default 20, max 100. |
num | For type=reviews: how many reviews per page. Max 50. |
page | Which page of results to return. |
The full machine-readable spec lives at /v1/openapi.json. Point your tooling or your agent at it.
Public, logged-out LinkedIn data through a second endpoint with the same clean shape. Pick what you want with type, pass a profile or company URL (or keywords), and get JSON back in about a second.
The types you can ask for:
| type | input | what you get |
|---|---|---|
profile | a /in/ URL | Full public profile: name, headline, about, location, followers, connections, work history, education, and skills |
company | a /company/ URL | Company info: industry, size, employee count, headquarters, website, specialties, similar companies |
posts | a profile or company URL | Recent posts: text, likes, date, type, and link |
jobs | keywords (+ location) or a job URL | Job search results, or full detail for one job: title, company, seniority, description, salary when shown |
search | keywords | Find people: name, headline, current title, company, and location |
Parameters
| param | what it does |
|---|---|
url | The LinkedIn URL, for profile, company, and posts. |
keywords | What to search for, for jobs and search. |
location | Optional location filter for type=jobs. |
limit | How many results to return for posts, jobs, and search. |
employees=true | On type=company: also return a sample of employees. |
comments=true | On type=posts: also return the comment count for each post. |
enrich=true | On type=search: return the full profile for every person found, not just the summary. |
Credits
One credit per successful call, the same as the rest of the API. The one exception is an enriched people search (type=search&enrich=true): because each result comes back as a complete profile, it bills one credit per profile returned, exactly what you would pay to fetch those profiles directly. Private or restricted pages return an empty result and are free.
CLI
Prefer the terminal? Install the CLI and get the same data from your shell, as JSON or CSV.
Output is JSON by default and pipes cleanly, the status line goes to stderr so your pipes stay clean. Pass --csv for CSV. It's on npm as crustapi-cli.
MCP for AI assistants
Give Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, or any MCP client live Google data. There's nothing to install, npx runs it. Add this to your client config and restart it.
Three tools appear. search is the whole menu behind one call, scrape_webpage turns any URL into clean text you can feed straight to an AI (RAG), and get_reviews pulls Google reviews for a business. The package is on npm as crustapi-mcp.
Integrations
CrustAPI is one HTTP endpoint, so it drops into any tool that can call a URL. Below is the copy-paste setup for the platforms people ask about most.
Enrich any Clay table with live Google data. Add an HTTP API enrichment column and point it here.
Map a table column into {{Company}} (or any query), then pull fields like places[0].website, places[0].phone, and places[0].reviewsCount into columns. Swap type=maps for web, news, or reviews to enrich with anything Google knows.
Same idea everywhere: a GET request to /v1/search with your key in the x-api-key header returns clean JSON you can map to fields. No SDK required.
LangChain, CrewAI, Haystack, and LlamaIndex all load an MCP server natively, so the MCP setup above makes CrustAPI a tool in any of them. Native packages for each framework are rolling out; check back or email support@crustapi.com for the one you need.
Agent payments (x402)
Your agent doesn't need a signup, a card, or a key to start. It can buy its own credits with x402, the open HTTP payment standard. If your agent framework already speaks x402, this works with no extra code from you.
Here's the whole handshake.
- Your agent calls
POST /v1/x402/topup?pack=agentwith no key. - We answer
402 Payment Requiredwith the amount, where to pay, and the USDC contract on Base. - The agent's wallet signs a gasless USDC authorization (EIP-3009) and sends the request again with the signature.
- We verify and settle it on-chain, then hand back a real API key that's already loaded with credits.
From there the key works like any other. The agent calls /v1/search and spends the credits it just bought.
The 402 challenge
Call the top-up endpoint with no key and you get back the payment terms.
After payment
Your x402 client signs the authorization and retries. We settle it and return a key that's ready to use.
A few things worth knowing:
- Payment is USDC on Base, and it's gasless. Your agent signs an authorization, so it doesn't need ETH to pay for gas.
- The agent pack is a $5 first deposit for 2,500 credits. The bigger packs work the same way, just pass a different pack as you scale up.
- Credits from an x402 payment are identical to credits bought with a card. One credit per successful search, and empty results are free.
Ask your AI
Still have questions? Copy this md file with detailed product description to ask your agent about it.
Agents can fetch it directly at crustapi.com/llms.txt.
Stuck on something that isn't here? Email support@crustapi.com and a human will answer.