Updated September 2026. Publish this page to the web (Share → Publish) to make it indexable.

When exactly does it stop working?

January 1, 2027. The Custom Search JSON API is already closed to new customers; existing keys work until the deadline. The "search the entire web" option in Programmable Search Engine expires the same day.

What did it cost until now?

100 free queries per day, then $5 per 1,000, capped at 10,000 queries per day. That price point is the benchmark migrating teams carry into any comparison.

What does Google offer instead?

Two site-restricted products (up to 50 domains) and an enterprise-tier search for AI grounding starting around $6,000/month. There is no official self-serve replacement for open-web results — for that, Google points to a waitlist with pricing "to come".

Who is affected?

Anyone whose tools read Google results programmatically: rank trackers, research pipelines, AI agents with grounding, internal dashboards. Bing's Search API already retired in August 2025, so this is the second wave of the same migration.

What should an SEO team do this quarter?

1. List which fields your scripts actually consume (usually position, URL, title, snippet).
2. Confirm your pages are in the index at all — run an indexation check on your URL lists before trusting any rank data.
3. Compare replacements by the data you need, not by feature tables.

Have a say in what gets built

SpeedyIndex is choosing which SERP data product to ship first — rank tracking, AI Overview citations, index-drop alerts, bulk site: data or donor indexation rates. Vote here (1 minute, multiple answers): https://forms.gle/Bdo7iKf1TEcgWCxb6