Request Options

Pass requests library options such as timeout, proxies, verify, stream, and cert.

SerpApi Python separates SerpApi query parameters from options passed to the underlying requests library.

SerpApi parameters, such as engine, q, location, hl, gl, no_cache, and json_restrictor, are sent to SerpApi as API request parameters. Request options, such as timeout and proxies, configure the local HTTP request made by the Python client.

Supported Request Options

The client passes these keyword arguments to requests.Session.request():

Option	Use
timeout	Override the client timeout for one request.
proxies	Send the request through HTTP or HTTPS proxies.
verify	Control TLS certificate verification.
stream	Ask requests to stream the HTTP response.
cert	Use a client certificate.

These options are supported by search(), search_archive(), account(), and locations().

Per-Request Timeout

Set a default timeout when creating the client:

client = serpapi.Client(api_key="secret_api_key", timeout=20)

Override it for a single request:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    timeout=5,
)

timeout=5 is passed to requests; it is not sent to SerpApi as a search parameter.

Proxies

Pass a requests-style proxies dictionary:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    proxies={
        "https": "http://proxy.example.com:8080",
    },
)

Keep proxy credentials in environment variables or your secret manager rather than hardcoding them in source files.

TLS Verification

By default, requests verifies TLS certificates. You can pass a custom CA bundle path:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    verify="/path/to/ca-bundle.pem",
)

Only disable verification for controlled local debugging:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    verify=False,
)

Do not use verify=False in production code.

Client Certificates

Pass a client certificate path, or a (cert, key) tuple, using cert:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    cert=("/path/to/client-cert.pem", "/path/to/client-key.pem"),
)

Combining Search Parameters and Request Options

Request options can be used alongside normal SerpApi parameters:

results = client.search(
    engine="google",
    q="coffee",
    location="Austin, Texas",
    hl="en",
    gl="us",
    json_restrictor="organic_results[].{title, link}",
    timeout=10,
)

The client handles this in two steps:

• timeout, proxies, verify, stream, and cert are passed to requests.
• All remaining keyword arguments are sent to SerpApi as API parameters.

If you pass a parameter dictionary and keyword arguments together, the remaining keyword arguments update the dictionary before the request is sent:

params = {"engine": "google", "q": "coffee"}
results = client.search(params, location="Austin, Texas", timeout=10)

In this example, location is added to the SerpApi request parameters, while timeout is passed to requests.

When you want to keep the original dictionary unchanged, pass a copy:

params = {"engine": "google", "q": "coffee"}
results = client.search(params.copy(), location="Austin, Texas")