Tavily vs Serper
Choosing between Tavily and Serper? Both are search providers you can call through a single Auxiliar key, so the honest answer is usually “use whichever wins the job in front of you” — and with one key and one bill, you don’t have to commit to either.
We ran both on the identical curator-fleet corpus. Serper leads on web search for grounding and RAG (7.24 vs 6.66). On the headline test (web search for grounding and RAG), Tavily scored 6.66/10 (recall@10 0.58) versus 7.24/10 for Serper. The full measured breakdown is below.
Measured, side by side
Composite score /10 on each shared capability, from the Auxiliar curator fleet — same corpus for both.
| Capability | Tavily | Serper | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| SearchRecall@10 | 6.660.58 · #7/11 | 7.240.57 · #3/11 | Serper |
Beyond the overlap
Capabilities each provider scored on that the other doesn't cover.
Tavily also does
- Crawl
- Answer
Serper also does
- SERP verticals
Tavily — choose if
You want the agent/RAG default that returns a relevance score and optional answer in one call.
Serper — choose if
You want the cheapest, fastest Google grounding and will synthesize results yourself.
Tavily — avoid if
You need per-result dates or a documented compliance/SLA posture.
Serper — avoid if
You need multi-engine coverage, rich-SERP features, or built-in content extraction.
One key. Every provider on this page.
Stop juggling signups and invoices. One Auxiliar API key calls all of them — upstream keys injected server-side, usage billed to a single balance. Swap the base URL and go.
curl https://api.auxiliar.ai/serper/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUXILIAR_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"q": "latest ai agent news"}'