Bulk Keyword Difficulty API
Keyword difficulty API — 0-100 KD scores for up to 1,000 keywords per call. A bulk keyword difficulty checker from $0.02.
Score how hard it is to rank for any keyword. Pass up to 1,000 terms in a single request and get back a 0–100 keyword difficulty value for each — the fastest way to prioritize which keywords are worth chasing.
Try it live
Fill in the fields and hit Run to see a real response.
{
"ok": true,
"data": {
"keywords": [
{
"keyword": "email finder api",
"difficulty": 0
},
{
"keyword": "seo api",
"difficulty": 22
}
]
}
}Features
Each term returns a normalized difficulty value from 0 (easy) to 100 (hard), calibrated against the strength of the pages currently ranking, so you can sort a keyword list by how winnable it is.
Send a full keyword list — one per line — and get every KD score back in a single response, replacing thousands of one-at-a-time lookups with one cheap batch request.
Difficulty is market-specific, so pass a location and language to score keywords against the SERP your audience actually sees rather than a blended global average.
Results come back as a flat array of { keyword, difficulty } objects, so scores drop straight into a spreadsheet, a database, or a keyword-prioritization script.
Use cases
Keyword Prioritization
Score a whole keyword list at once and focus effort on low-difficulty, high-intent terms you can realistically rank for.
Content Gap Triage
Run competitor keyword exports through the endpoint to find the easy wins hiding in a long list of opportunities.
Programmatic SEO Filtering
Gate which pages get built by dropping every keyword above a difficulty threshold before generation begins.
Quick start
Copy this snippet and start making calls.
const res = await fetch('https://api.yepapi.com/v1/seo/keywords/difficulty', {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'x-api-key': 'YOUR_API_KEY',
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"keywords": [
"seo api",
"keyword research tool",
"backlink checker"
],
"location": "us",
"language": "en"
}),
});
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);The keyword difficulty API for developers — bulk KD scores at scale
The keyword difficulty API returns a 0–100 KD score for up to 1,000 keywords in a single request. Instead of checking terms one at a time in a keyword difficulty checker, you post a list and get every KD score back as clean JSON — the fastest way to sort a keyword universe by how hard it is to rank.
At $0.02 per call for up to 1,000 keywords, it works as a bulk keyword difficulty tool built for scale: score an entire programmatic SEO project, triage a competitor's keyword export, or feed live difficulty data to an agent. One YepAPI key also unlocks the Keyword Overview and Search Intent endpoints so scoring and enrichment share the same auth.
Every KD score is calibrated against the authority of the pages currently ranking for each term, so a difficulty of 20 means genuinely winnable and 80 means you'll need serious links and content depth. Pass a location and language to score against the exact SERP your audience sees.
What is a keyword difficulty API?
A keyword difficulty API returns, as data, how hard it is to rank a page for a given search term. You send a list of keywords and receive a 0–100 KD score for each, calibrated against the authority of the pages that currently rank. That turns keyword prioritization into something you can automate — filter thousands of terms by rankability in one pass. YepAPI serves this from /v1/seo/keywords/difficulty: post up to 1,000 keywords with a location and language and get back a flat array of scores.
What is a good keyword difficulty score?
As a rule of thumb, a KD score under 20 is low difficulty and realistic for a newer or mid-authority site, 20–50 is moderate and usually needs solid on-page work plus a few quality links, and anything above 50 is hard — reserved for sites with established topical authority and strong backlink profiles. Because the API scores in bulk, most teams set a threshold (say, KD ≤ 30) and let the response filter a keyword list automatically instead of judging terms by hand.
Keyword difficulty API pricing — $0.02 per call
Pricing is $0.02 per call for up to 1,000 keywords, with no seats and no monthly minimum. Ahrefs and Semrush lock comparable difficulty data behind four-figure monthly or enterprise plans; YepAPI meters it per request with $5 of free credit to start, so scoring 10,000 keywords costs about twenty cents across ten batches.
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A pay-per-call Ahrefs & Semrush API alternative
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What developers say
“Switched from SerpAPI and cut our SERP costs by 80%. Same data quality, way simpler billing.”
“One API key for AI models, SERP data, and web scraping. Saved us from managing 4 separate providers.”
“The $5 free credit let us prototype our entire rank tracking feature before committing. No other API does that.”
Frequently asked questions
Score how hard it is to rank for any keyword. Pass up to 1,000 terms in a single request and get back a 0–100 keyword difficulty value for each — the fastest way to prioritize which keywords are worth chasing.
Each API call costs $0.02. No monthly minimums or subscriptions — you only pay for what you use.
Sign up for a free API key, then send a POST request to /v1/seo/keywords/difficulty. Check the code example above for a ready-to-use snippet in JavaScript, cURL, or Python.
YepAPI bundles SEO, AI, and web scraping APIs under one key with no monthly minimums. You get lower per-call pricing, a unified dashboard, and one billing account instead of managing multiple providers.
There's no universal cutoff, but a common framework: a KD score of 0–20 is low difficulty and winnable for most sites, 20–50 is moderate and needs solid content plus some links, and 50+ is hard and best left to established, authoritative domains. Because YepAPI returns a 0–100 KD score for every keyword in bulk, you can set your own threshold — for example, only build pages for terms scoring 30 or below — and filter the whole list in code.
Keyword difficulty is derived from the strength of the pages currently ranking on page one for a term — primarily their backlink profiles and overall authority. The more high-authority, well-linked pages that already rank, the higher the KD score. YepAPI normalizes this into a single 0–100 value per keyword, calibrated to the location and language you pass, so scores are comparable across your whole keyword list.
YepAPI gives you $5 of free credit on signup, which covers 250 calls of up to 1,000 keywords each — effectively a free keyword difficulty checker for up to 250,000 keywords before you pay anything. After that it's $0.02 per call with no subscription. Most 'free' keyword difficulty tools cap you at a handful of lookups per day or gate the API behind a paid plan.
Up to 1,000 keywords per request. Send them one per line in the keywords field and every term comes back with its KD score in a single response, so a 50,000-keyword project is just 50 calls.
Both — it's the data engine you'd use to build a keyword difficulty tool. Instead of a dashboard you check by hand, you get raw 0–100 KD scores over HTTP, so you can wire bulk keyword difficulty into your own app, spreadsheet, content pipeline, or AI agent. Sign up, POST a keyword list to /v1/seo/keywords/difficulty, and parse the JSON.
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