# Keyword research API: Google search volume, CPC and competition for a list of keywords

Hand your agent a list of keywords and get a figure back for each one: average monthly searches, the competition level and the top of page bid range. 5 tools answer through 鹦鹉AI, each at its own rate. Google's own tool answers with a number per keyword rather than the bucket the Keyword Planner screen shows you. It is the tool the research behind these pages runs on.

## What is the best way to ask 鹦鹉AI?

Setup line (paste into any agent): `set up 鹦鹉AI — https://parrot.amorist.cn/llms.txt`

Then ask: "Using 鹦鹉AI, get the average monthly searches, competition and top of page bid for these 200 keywords in the US in English, show me the price per tool first, batch them into as few calls as the tool allows, and sort the table by volume with the ones that returned no data listed separately."

- **Batch, do not loop** One tool charges a flat rate per request for up to a thousand keywords. Sending them one at a time on that tool multiplies the bill by a thousand for the same answer.
- **Name the country and language** Volume is per market. A keyword measured across everywhere is a number that describes nowhere, and every tool here wants the market stated.
- **Ask for the price per tool first** 鹦鹉AI prints each rate before the call, so the choice is not a guess.
- **Keep the empty rows visible** Google returns nothing for some ordinary words, and a tool that drops them quietly leaves you reading a shorter list than you sent.

## Why go through 鹦鹉AI

- **No subscription, no seats** Charged per call. No card, no minimum; top up the prepaid balance.
- **Switch by changing a word** Another tool is a different word in the prompt, not a new integration.

Endpoints:

- `seranking.google.keywords.volume` — Bulk Google search volume, CPC and difficulty by keyword (google): https://parrot.amorist.cn/catalog/google
- `serpstat.google.keywords.volume` — Bulk Google search volume, CPC and difficulty by keyword (google): https://parrot.amorist.cn/catalog/google
- `dataforseo.google.keywords.volume` — Google search volume and CPC for up to 1000 keywords (google): https://parrot.amorist.cn/catalog/google
- `google-ads.google.keywords.volume` — Google search volume, competition, bids by keyword list (google): https://parrot.amorist.cn/catalog/google
- `semrush.google.keywords.volume` — Google search volume, CPC and competition by keyword (google): https://parrot.amorist.cn/catalog/google

## What people actually struggle with

SEO tooling threads are seeded on an industrial scale: of the ~180 Reddit and X posts read in August 2026, three near identical six week bake off posts landed on the same recommendation in the same house style, two subreddits in the results were review farms, and one post ran word for word from two different accounts. These five are people with a spreadsheet and a problem.

**The screen answers in buckets**

> "It keeps showing me ranges such as 100-1k. This is very hard for me to guess for any good decision I wish to make." (r/googleads: https://www.reddit.com/r/googleads/comments/1dodfc3/how_do_i_see_the_exact_monthly_search_volume/)

What this page can do about it: The Google Ads tool here is the same Keyword Planner data through the API, and it answers with a figure per keyword rather than a range. That figure is Google's own rounded number, so treat it as a rank rather than a count.

**The export rounds everything to nothing**

> "when i export in CSV it's either 50, 500, 5000 or 50000 for all results" (r/googleads: https://www.reddit.com/r/googleads/comments/1dz73xx/important_features_missing_from_keyword_planner/)

What this page can do about it: That is the data quality floor the API is worth having for. Every tool here returns a per keyword field an agent can sort, join and put in a table, which the export cannot give you at any spend level.

**The bid estimate and the invoice are different numbers**

> "Keyword planner says Low competition keyword top page bid high range is 0.03 credits. Why am I paying 112 credits?" (r/PPC, 8 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/1grv58y/google_ads_keyword_planner_says_low_competition/)

What this page can do about it: No tool on this page fixes that, and any page that says otherwise is selling. The bid fields are an estimate of an auction. Use them to rank keywords against one another, and take what you actually pay from your own campaign data.

**Twenty thousand keywords is not a spreadsheet job**

> "there are like 20,000 keywords, so it's not something a standard VLOOKUP will work for" (r/SEO: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1dj6b4z/keyword_api_suggestions/)

What this page can do about it: This is the case per call pricing is for. A flat per request tool batches up to a thousand keywords at a time, so twenty thousand is twenty calls at a rate printed before the first one, with no plan to be on.

**The tools do not know about traffic you are already getting**

> "lately we've been seeing a lot of traffic in Google Search Console from keywords that don't even exist in the tools we're using" (r/SEO: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1ry5v7o/should_i_trust_tools_on_keyword_search_volume/)

What this page can do about it: Which is the honest limit of every tool here. These are models of demand, not records of it. Search Console data is the one source that is actually counting, and that tool is in this same catalog.

## What actually differs

- The Google Ads tool is the real thing. It counts against the developer token's own daily operation limit, and it returns a figure per keyword rather than the range the Keyword Planner screen shows. The figure is Google's own rounded number and not a raw count. The cost of this tool is not money, it is access: Google's flow pushes you towards creating a campaign on the way in, and the developer token is its own approval.
- The numbers will not agree, and no tool here is ground truth. Each tool models Google's data its own way, so the same keyword comes back with different volumes on different tools, and Search Console will show you clicks on queries that none of them list at all. The bid range is an estimate of an auction rather than the auction: practitioners regularly report paying many times the figure, or a fraction of it. Use these fields to rank keywords against each other and take your real cost from your own campaign data. 鹦鹉AI gives each tool's figure; the agent picks, and 鹦鹉AI never routes or fails over between them.

## What is a keyword research API?

It is a call that takes a list of keywords and returns what an advertiser's data set knows about each one: roughly how many times a month people search it, how contested it is, and what advertisers are paying at the top of the page. The reason people want it as an API rather than a screen is volume and shape. The Keyword Planner screen shows bucketed ranges to accounts that are not spending, its CSV export collapses everything to a handful of round numbers, and neither is something you can join onto twenty thousand rows. Every tool here answers per keyword, in a response an agent can put in a table.

## Before you start

**Is this the same data as Google Keyword Planner?** The Google Ads tool is, and it answers with a figure per keyword instead of the range the screen shows. The other tools are each vendor's own model of the same underlying signal, which is why their numbers differ from Google's and from each other.

**Why do the volume numbers differ between tools?** Because none of them is counting searches. Each one models Google's published signal in its own way, and this page will not crown one, because there is no ground truth to crown it against. Pull the same list from two tools for a few credits and treat the disagreement as the error bar.

**How much does ten thousand keywords cost?** It depends entirely on which tool and how you batch, and 鹦鹉AI prints each rate before the call so the agent can say the number first.

## Workflows that use this job

- [Keyword volume checker: expand a seed, price the demand, read the seasonality](https://parrot.amorist.cn/workflows/keyword-demand-to-ad-budget)

HTML version: https://parrot.amorist.cn/use-cases/keyword-volume-cpc-and-competition