Google News API
Google retired its own News API in 2011 and never replaced it. This Google News API takes a topic and a country and returns the current articles as rows — headline, publisher, publish date, snippet, image and link — for $0.0005 per delivered article, with no subscription and no key from Google.
$0.0005 per delivered article · $2 free every month · Failed runs never billed
$ curl $QD/google_news/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-d '{ "query": "electric vehicles",
"country": "gb", "max_results": 40 }'
{ "status": "done", "count": 40,
"results": [
{ "title": "EV sales rebound in…",
"source": "Reuters", "date": "3 hours ago",
"description": "Registrations rose…",
"image": "https://…", "link": "https://…" } ],
"cost": 0.02 }
# 40 articles × $0.0005 · nothing delivered, nothing charged
What a Google News API is, now that Google’s own is gone
Google deprecated the Google News Search API in 2011 and never shipped a successor, so a "Google News API" today means a service that reads the public Google News results and returns them as JSON. That is what this collector is: a topic goes in, dated articles with their publishers come out.
The alternative most people find is a licensed news aggregator with its own index and its own idea of which publishers matter. Reading Google News instead means you get what Google actually surfaces for that query in that country today — including the local publishers an aggregator will not have licensed.
The country field matters more here than on any other collector: the same topic returns different outlets, different framing and different volumes per market. Run it per country when you are building market research data or grounding a model on what happened this week.
What comes back for every article
Seven fields, published and versioned. No full text: the link is there for you to fetch the article with the Web Scraping API when you want the body as Markdown.
| Field | Type | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
title | string | Headline as shown. |
source | string | Publisher name. |
date | string | Publish date or age as shown ("3 hours ago"). |
description | string | Snippet under the headline. |
link | string | Article URL at the publisher. |
image | string | Thumbnail URL when present. |
rank | integer | Position across the merged pages. |
Inputs: a topic is enough
Everything else narrows the market: country sets both the proxy exit and Google’s locale, so results match what a reader there would see.
| Input | Type | Required | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
query | string | yes | Topic or keywords — "electric vehicles", "interest rate decision". |
country | string | no | ISO code — the single most useful field on this collector. |
lang | string | no | Interface language (en, it, de…). |
max_results | integer | no | 1–100, default 10. Billed on delivered articles only. |
Pricing
What a Google News API costs here
Articles are billed at $0.0005 each, delivered — $0.50 per 1,000. A newsroom-style watch on 20 topics, 40 articles each, four times a day is about 3,200 rows daily: roughly $1.60, and a quiet topic that returns nothing costs nothing.
Pay as you go
- $2 free credit / month
- 60 requests / min
- List unit prices
Starter
- $15 free credit / month
- 300 requests / min
- 10% off unit prices
Growth
- $50 free credit / month
- 600 requests / min
- 20% off unit prices
Scale
- $250 free credit / month
- 1,200 requests / min
- 30% off unit prices
Same wallet, same key and same $2 monthly allowance as every other Data API. Prices are launch pricing read live from the billing config — GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.
Integration
One POST, typed rows
Base URL https://api.quanticdata.io/v1, Bearer auth, the same key as every other Data API. Endpoint: POST /v1/.
# EV coverage in the UK, 40 articles
curl https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/google_news/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "query": "electric vehicles", "country": "gb",
"max_results": 40 }'
What people run it for
News is the cheapest unit here, which changes what is worth watching.
Brand and competitor watch
A query per brand, per country, several times a day. At $0.0005 an article a wide watchlist costs less than the alerting tool that would tell you about it.
Grounding an LLM
Dated headlines with publishers and links are a compact, checkable context window — the model cites a real outlet instead of remembering one, the pattern the web data API for AI is built around.
Market and country research
The same topic across markets shows which countries are talking about it and who is driving the framing — raw material for market research data.
Event and risk monitoring
Supply chains, regulation, outages: run narrow queries often, keep the ISO-dated rows, and alert on volume changes rather than on single articles.
Collector vs news aggregator APIs vs RSS
Three ways to read the news programmatically, and what each gives up.
| Licensed aggregator | Google News RSS | This collector | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage | the publishers they licensed | the feed Google exposes | what Google actually surfaces for the query |
| Per-country results | sometimes, per plan | limited | a first-class input, exit geo included |
| Structure | clean JSON | XML you parse yourself | typed rows, published schema |
| Pricing | monthly plans and minimums | free but fragile and rate-limited | $0.0005 per delivered article |
| Blocked or empty runs | n/a | silent gaps | never billed |
Aggregation versus a curated index
Google retired its own News API; what remains officially is RSS, which is free, easy and shallow — a fixed number of recent items per feed with no pagination and no way to work back through a topic.
The commercial news APIs are the real alternatives and they sell things this does not: licensed full text, multi-year archives, sentiment and entity extraction. What they trade away is breadth. A curated index of a few thousand publishers, skewed toward English-language and larger outlets, misses the regional and non-English sources that Google's aggregation reaches — and for monitoring, the story usually breaks in the small outlet first.
Limits, editions and the legal bit
Up to 100 articles per run. It reads the current news vertical rather than an archive, which makes it a monitoring tool rather than a historical research one — for deep archives the licensed news APIs are the right product. Throughput is your plan's rate limit rather than anything about the collector: 60 requests/minute on pay-as-you-go, up to 1,200 on the top tier.
Google News is genuinely per-edition. The same query in different countries returns different publications and different stories because each edition indexes a different publisher set, so monitor by running the query per market rather than by translating one result set.
Collecting publicly visible data is generally lawful in most jurisdictions, and courts have repeatedly declined to treat reading a public page as unauthorised access. Article bodies are not fetched — headlines, snippets and links only. Article text is the publisher's copyright, and several jurisdictions have specific press-publisher rights covering exactly this kind of aggregation, so analysing and linking sits very differently from republishing. None of this is legal advice — get some for your actual use case.
FAQ
Google’s own News API has been gone since 2011 — most of these questions come from people discovering that.
Something else? Ask us →Is the Google News API still available?
No. Google deprecated the News Search API in 2011 and has not published a replacement, which is why every current "Google News API" is a third-party service reading the public results. This collector does that and returns dated articles with source, snippet and link.
Is there a free Google News API?
The $2 monthly allowance covers about 4,000 delivered articles, no card required, and renews every month. Free aggregator tiers exist too, but they cap requests hard and cover only the publishers they license.
Do I need a Google API key?
No. You authenticate with your QuanticData key; there is nothing to register on Google’s side. Requests run through our residential network, and blocked attempts are retried internally and never billed to you.
Does it return the full article text?
No — it returns headline, source, date, snippet, image and link, which is what the results page shows. To get the body, pass the link to the Web Scraping API and you get clean Markdown at $0.0002 per page.
Can I search news by country?
Yes, and you should: country sets both the proxy exit and Google’s locale, so a topic returns the outlets a reader in that market would see. Running the same query across four countries is four cheap runs, not one blurred average.
How far back does it go?
It reads the current results for the query rather than an archive, so it is a "what is being published now" tool, not a historical corpus. Teams that need history run it on a schedule and accumulate the dated rows on their side.
Can I use it to give an AI current news context?
It is well suited to it: dated, source-attributed headlines and snippets are exactly what a model needs to answer about the present instead of from a training cutoff. Bodies are not included, so a model can cite and link rather than reproduce.
How far back can I go?
It reads the live vertical, not an archive, so it answers "what is being published now" rather than "what was published in 2019". Historical depth is what the licensed news APIs sell.
Start with the Google News API
$0.0005 per delivered article, $0.50 per 1,000 delivered articles. $2 of free credit every month, no card — and a run that delivers nothing is never billed.
Get my free API key