Google's Custom Search JSON API (CSE) returns HTTP 410 Gone on January 1, 2027, giving developers 9 months to migrate. The shutdown notice appeared in January 2026 via a quiet blog post and console emails. Google recommends Vertex AI Search, but it's an enterprise semantic search over private corpora starting at ~$2/1,000 queries — not a public web search replacement. Google officially suggests "third-party providers" for web search at scale.

Third-party SERP APIs — SerpApi ($75-$500/mo), Scale Serp (~$50/mo), Bright Data (enterprise) — each emit different JSON schemas, requiring parser rewrites. The google-cse-replacement actor (on Apify) preserves the exact CSE JSON schema (items[].title, link, snippet, totalResults) atop a SERP scraping backend, enabling a two-line code change. At 100,000 searches/month, pricing matches CSE's former $500/mo; pay-per-execution benefits lower volumes.

CSE's quota math: 100 free queries/day; paid tier $5/1,000 queries up to 10,000 queries/day per engine ID. Multiple engine IDs allowed higher throughput — a trick that disappears with the shutdown. Migration checklist: audit query volume, pick provider, swap endpoint, verify schema parity, test rate limits.