SerpAPI is down?

This article is dated September 16, 2026. Teams asking whether SerpAPI is down this week have a public record to look at. Their status page has listed Performance Degradation through mid-September 2026. On September 10, 2026 they reported a service outage across their APIs. An update on September 16, 2026, 05:13 UTC said success rate and response time had improved over the previous few hours. The incident was still open at the time of writing.

SerpAPI's September 10 note attributes the issue to recent changes on Google's side. That is the part that matters for anyone running a Google Search integration. The same incident history already lists several Google Search tickets through July and August.

What Google changed

Over the last year, Google has made automated collection of Search results harder.

In September 2025 it disabled &num=100. Pipelines that expected 100 results per page had to paginate. We covered that in Google killed num=100.

In December 2025 Google filed a lawsuit against SerpAPI, alleging circumvention of SearchGuard. The public technical picture is in Google sues SerpAPI: What SearchGuard reveals.

In late August 2026, organic result links started pointing at google.com/goto?url=CAES… instead of the destination URL. The parameter is not a decodable URL. Google returns the destination in the Location header on /goto. Rollout: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update. Method: read Location with HEAD.

That /goto article was discussed on Hacker News. Most comments are about the consumer Search experience. For API providers, the practical effect is an extra request per result, and a clearer signal when a client resolves many /goto URLs in sequence.

SearchGuard sits underneath. Sessions that look automated can receive incomplete pages or errors. Together with /goto, that appears as higher latency and error rates on Google Search endpoints.

Public timeline (July-September 2026)

From SerpAPI's incident history, limited to Google Search. All dates below are 2026.

July

July 7-12: slower responses and lower success rates. Closed after internal and upstream changes
July 13-August 1: Google Light paginated searches (start) returning empty results
July 14-17: slower Google APIs; some Light responses empty. Status note cited recent Google changes plus an upstream provider
July 20-August 14: elevated latency on Google Search and Google Light

August

August 7-9: outage across many Google APIs; a large share of requests failing or timing out
August 14-15: Google API degradation, attributed to changes on Google's end. Marked resolved the next day
August 26 onward (still open): tbm=nws timeouts, and Google Search queries with advanced operators timing out or returning HTTP 500 (500 noted August 29)

September

September 4-10: elevated response times on Search, Shopping, News Light, Jobs, and others. Closed on September 10, pointing to the already-open News and advanced-operator tickets
September 5-7: Google News degraded, then marked resolved
September 10, 15:59 UTC (still open): service outage, then Performance Degradation. Note on Google-side changes (roadmap #4265). Partial mitigation September 10-11; location and uule described as unreliable outside the US (gl, hl, google_domain as the workaround). Further error-rate and latency spikes September 14-15. Update on September 16, 05:13 UTC: better success rate and response time over the previous hours
September 11 (still open): Google Local returning empty results

Late August and September line up with the /goto rollout. The July tickets are earlier Google-side latency, before /goto was consistent.

Autom is fully operational

Autom's Google Search API is 100% functional on these recent Google changes. We resolve /goto by reading Location (no follow) and return the destination in organic_results[].link, in the same structured fields as before.

Pagination after num=100 and SearchGuard handling were already in the pipeline. If you call our Google Search endpoints, you should keep receiving usable destination URLs.

1,000 free requests on Autom pricing, API key at app.autom.dev/register.