Nathan Kessler
Nathan Kessler is the founder and editor of serp.fast. He runs the tool directory and writes most of the comparisons, guides, and industry news himself. His focus is the web data layer that AI products depend on: scraping and crawling APIs, search APIs, and the browser tools that let agents work on live sites. He tests these the way a buyer would, paying more attention to reliability, real pricing, and whether a vendor can be trusted than to a feature list.
Articles by Nathan Kessler
- Web Bot Auth: how AI agents prove who they are so the web stops blocking them
- One agent task, twenty search calls: a cost model for agentic search pricing
- Exa and Parallel are priced like infrastructure now. Price your dependency accordingly
- Atlas lasted under a year: agent browsing lives server-side
- Crawler purpose is now a product spec: reading Cloudflare's September 15 default as a buyer
- The provenance questions your web data vendor must answer before August 2
- MCP is going stateless: what the 2026-07-28 revision breaks in your web data integration
- Do you still need a search API when the model has web search? Two 2026 evals, read carefully
- Three payment rails, one web: Cloudflare Pay Per Use vs Microsoft's marketplace vs RSL
- Google's DMCA claims against SerpApi were dismissed. What that changes in your SERP API contract
- Your search API just got acquired: a diligence checklist after Tavily, Jina and ScrapingBee
- The agent browser stack: browser infrastructure vs browser agent framework
- Search API latency for AI agents: how to build a latency budget
- Migrating off the Bing Search API: a field-by-field replacement guide
- Deep Research APIs Compared: Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Valyu and You.com
- How to evaluate a web search API for RAG: run your own bake-off
- Native model web search vs a dedicated search API
- Search API, crawl API or extract API: picking the right retrieval primitive
- Choosing a web search tool in LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex and the Vercel AI SDK
- SERP API Coverage by Vertical: News, Maps, Shopping, Scholar and Jobs
- Web search API cost per query: credits, requests, pages, and tokens
- Are web scraping MCP servers safe? Running a third-party web data server in production
- Web Data Vendor Due Diligence: The Questions to Ask Before You Sign
- Brave Search API vs Tavily: Independent Index or Agent-Tuned Retrieval (2026)
- Browser Use vs Stagehand: Autonomous Agent or Scripted Primitives (2026)
- Browserbase vs Browserless: Agent Sessions or Headless Browsers on Tap (2026)
- Exa vs Parallel AI: Relevance-First or Research-Throughput Retrieval (2026)
- Firecrawl vs Jina Reader: Two Routes to LLM-Ready Markdown (2026)
- SerpApi vs DataForSEO: Focused SERP API or Full Data Platform (2026)
- Indirect prompt injection: the web page your agent reads is now an attack surface
- Amazon v. Perplexity and the new rule for AI agents: identity, not access
- Pay per crawl is here: the web's new payment and verification layer for AI agents
- The web is closing as the agents arrive: what bot-majority traffic means for web data access
- AI Search APIs Compared: Exa vs Tavily vs Perplexity vs Linkup (2026)
- Exa vs Linkup: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- Exa vs Perplexity Sonar: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- Tavily vs Perplexity Sonar: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- Web-data MCP servers grew up in mid-2026, and so did the risk
- Best Open-Source Web Scraping Frameworks in 2026: A Builder's Guide
- Web data pricing in 2026: why a $0.30 page and a $5 query can cost the same
- Web Content Extraction Benchmarks: How to Evaluate Scraping Quality
- Web Access for AI Agents: Architecture & Tools
- AI Web Agent Benchmarks: A 2026 Field Guide
- How to Pick a Web Scraping API for AI Agents in 2026
- Build vs Buy: Getting Web Data Into Your AI Pipeline
- Cheapest SERP APIs in 2026: What Each Tier Actually Buys You
- Extract Clean Markdown from Any URL: Tools and Approaches
- Independent Search Indexes for AI: Querying the Web Without Google
- Who owns the index? The question AI builders skip when evaluating search APIs
- The SERP API landscape in 2026
- The web scraping API landscape in 2026
- Playwright vs Puppeteer (2026): Decision Guide
- What changed in web data tools – April 2026
- The legal status of web scraping in 2026
- The agentic extraction wave: how Browserbase, Browser Use, and Stagehand changed web scraping
- Getting Started with AI Search APIs
- The AI search API landscape in 2026
- Browserbase vs Steel: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- Web scraping tools ranked by total funding
- Comparing browser infrastructure for web scraping
- MCP, Tool Use & How AI Agents Access the Web
- Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- Cloud Browser Infrastructure for AI Agents
- Web Data for LLM Training: Sources, Quality & Scale
- SerpApi vs Serper: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- How to Choose a Search API for Your AI Product
- Exa vs Tavily: Pricing & Features Compared (2026)
- RAG Data Sources: Where to Get Live Web Data
- Fast Web Scraping: How AI-Native APIs Shifted the Speed Tradeoff
- AI Search APIs Explained: Giving LLMs Eyes on the Web
- Why Your AI Product Needs Real-Time Web Access