Griptape WebSearch Driver: Serper

Serper is a cheap API that hands you Google search results in JSON - no scraping, no captchas, just an API key and a few cents per thousand queries. In the Griptape pack it's the "I want actual Google results" web-search driver, and it's the least configurable of the three. You get exactly two settings and a key, which is either refreshingly simple or a hint that this driver is a work in progress. For grounding an agent in current facts, it's a solid choice - especially if you want news, places, or images result types that the other drivers don't offer.

How it works

The node builds a SerperWebSearchDriver from the SERPER_API_KEY it reads from ComfyUI's Griptape settings (or your environment). Notably, it's the only one of the three web-search drivers without an api_key_env_var field in the UI - the key name is fixed. The two inputs:

• search_type (default all) - all, news, places, images, or patents. This is the driver's real differentiator: you can search images and places, which Exa and Tavily don't do.
• date_range (default all) - past hour, past 24 hours/day, past week, past month, past year. Mapped to Serper's single-letter range codes under the hood.

Output is DRIVER (WEB_SEARCH_DRIVER), which plugs into the Griptape Web Search tool node to run actual searches for your agent.

The catch: it ships on a third-party dependency

This is the one to read closely, because Serper support does not live in griptape's main package. The pack's requirements.txt pulls it from a separate GitHub repo: git+https://github.com/mertdeveci5/griptape-serper-driver-extension.git. ComfyUI Manager installs the pack's full requirements, so it usually "just works" - but if you manually installed with only pip install "griptape[all]" python-dotenv and this node fails to import, that's why. The extension isn't part of griptape itself. If the node shows up with an import error, reinstall the pack via Manager or pip-install that git URL directly. It's also a good reminder that this driver sits one fork away from the main project, so don't be shocked if its behavior lags the others.

Install

Pack install is the usual path: ComfyUI Manager → search "Griptape" → INSTALL, restart. Manual route is git clone https://github.com/griptape-ai/ComfyUI-Griptape into custom_nodes. If you go manual, don't skip the requirements step - that's where the Serper extension gets installed. And as ever with this pack, keep the README's torch fix handy. Your key comes from serper.dev, and with a couple hundred free credits it's enough to decide whether Google SERP quality is worth it for your agent.