Meet the Google-Scraping Startup Used by ChatGPT, Cursor and Perplexity

Last week, we wrote about SerpApi, an Austin-based startup that scrapes Google Search results and offers that data through an application programming interface. Among its customers is OpenAI, which uses SerpApi’s services to ensure its ChatGPT can answer user queries with up-to-date information. (SerpApi CEO and founder Julien Khaleghy wouldn’t comment on whether OpenAI is a customer.)

Around 40% of SerpApi’s business comes from AI startups, Khaleghy said, though that figure excludes companies SerpApi has an NDA with. SerpApi's AI startup customers include Cursor, Perplexity and Meta Platforms. Another 40% comes from marketers doing search engine optimization, and the remaining business comes from more creative applications, like banks doing background checks on customers, he said.

That’s not how SerpApi started. Khaleghy told me that he founded the company in 2017 when he was trying to find a faster way to mass download images of food from Google Images so he could train an AI model for a calorie counting app. At first, most of the company’s business came from marketers who wanted to see how well their companies were ranked on Google Search, Khaleghy said. 

But over time, more AI startups became interested in SerpApi’s services to either mass scrape the web for training data or to do real-time searches to provide their chatbots and models with up-to-date information, he said.