Google Search API alternatives in 2026

1. Create a key under Agents & API in the workspace. A new account gets $10 of credit, no card, which covers 10,000 searches.

2. Change the host. https://api.specstream.ai/customsearch/v1 answers the call your code sends to https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1 today. The key goes in key=, in X-Goog-Api-Key or as a Bearer token.

# Before
curl "https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=$GOOGLE_API_KEY&cx=$CX&q=$QUERY&num=10"

# After
curl "https://api.specstream.ai/customsearch/v1?key=$SPECSTREAM_API_KEY&cx=$CX&q=$QUERY&num=10"

In Python:

import os
import requests

BASE = "https://api.specstream.ai"  # was https://www.googleapis.com

reply = requests.get(
    f"{BASE}/customsearch/v1",
    params={"key": os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"], "q": "open source vector databases", "num": 10},
).json()

for item in reply["items"]:
    print(item["title"], item["link"], item["snippet"])

3. Leave the rest. A call of up to 10 results costs $0.001. Every parameter and reply field is in the Google Custom Search migration guide, and the dates are on the shutdown page.

On MCP, your agent calls search_web with {"q": ...} and read_pages with {"urls": [...]} at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp.