cloro launches free tier for SERP and AI web scraping API

cloro is a web scraping API designed to extract and structure data from search engine results and AI chat models. The service was built in response to the operational friction teams face when using multiple APIs: each provider (OpenAI's ChatGPT with Web Search, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overview, and Google Search itself) requires a separate integration, charges based on tokens consumed (which vary by model and are hard to predict), and does not provide the tools to influence ranking factors or perform comparative SEO analysis across sources.

cloro's unified approach returns the same data structure—parsed markdown, source URLs with labels, and citations—from any of these sources via a single API call, along with additional parsed elements like shopping blocks and query fan-outs. The API is synchronous by default (delivering responses in 30–45 seconds on average) but also supports asynchronous requests via webhook for high-volume use. It handles retries automatically, attempting failed requests up to 10 times over a maximum of 5 minutes, and returns results as lightweight structured JSON by default (though raw HTML is available on request).

Pricing begins with a free tier offering 500 monthly credits, 1 concurrent job, and community support. Paid plans span 11 tiers: Lite at $30/month (37,500 credits, $0.80 per 1,000 credits) through Enterprise 5K at $5,000/month (16,391,783 credits, $0.31 per 1,000 credits), plus custom Enterprise plans with higher concurrency and annual contract discounts. Each plan includes a defined number of concurrent jobs (ranging from 1 to 255+) and concurrent execution limits; customers who exceed their plan's concurrency receive a 429 HTTP status code and can implement client-side queuing or switch to async mode. Concurrency can be increased by upgrading to a higher-volume tier, though cloro reserves the right to negotiate if a customer consistently uses more than 70% of their available concurrency.

Credits are debited only on successful data extraction; failed requests do not consume credits. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle and do not roll over. The service operates globally but notes regional restrictions—for example, Google Gemini has limited availability in the EU. cloro's target customers are top SEO and AI SEO companies that need to track brand and competitor visibility across global search results at low latency.

cloro positions itself as a solution to fragmentation in the web scraping and AI search landscape. Rather than forcing developers to integrate directly with each AI model provider (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) or search engine API separately, it offers a single normalized endpoint that returns the same structured format—parsed markdown, citations, and JSON—regardless of source. This consolidation targets a real pain point: each direct provider API requires separate engineering work, uses different pricing models (often token-based and unpredictable), and provides limited tooling to influence or analyze SEO. By unifying these sources under one credits-based pricing model, cloro reduces both technical debt and cost visibility.

The pricing strategy reflects a freemium approach: the free tier (500 credits/month, 1 concurrent job) is generous enough for experimentation or small-scale use, while paid tiers scale from $30/month to $5,000+ with concurrency limits and per-credit costs that drop as volume increases. This structure benefits SEO teams and AI companies that need to monitor search results and competitor activity at scale across multiple geographies, which the service explicitly supports.

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