Plan a migration off the Custom Search JSON API ahead of its January 2027 discontinuation for existing customers
domain: developers.google.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Confirm eligibility: the Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, so only existing accounts can still provision keys
For existing integrations, budget for the free tier of 100 queries/day, with paid overage at $5 per 1,000 queries up to a 10,000/day hard cap
Monitor usage via the Cloud Platform Console's API Dashboard, or via Cloud Operations by filtering service = 'customsearch.googleapis.com'
Plan a migration off the API before its January 1, 2027 discontinuation date, evaluating Google's suggested Vertex AI Search alternative for site-search use cases up to 50 domains
For use cases needing full open-web search rather than a bounded Programmable Search Engine, contact Google directly, since the replacement path differs by use case
Known gotchas
New projects cannot get access to this API at all — any workflow that assumes it's still generally available needs a fallback plan
The hard 10,000-queries/day cap applies even to paying customers; this API cannot be scaled arbitrarily for high-volume programmatic search
January 1, 2027 is a full service discontinuation for existing customers too, not just a soft deprecation notice
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