Is There a Google News API? What Developers Use Instead
No: Google shut down its news search API in 2011, and nothing official has replaced it. Developers pick one of three options instead: the Google News RSS feeds, a SERP scraping API, or GNews API, which returns headlines based on Google News rankings and keyword search across 80,000+ sources, as JSON.
Is there an official Google News API?
Google News is a product, not a developer platform. Its search API closed in 2011, and the only official API that touches news today is the Search Console API, which only reports on websites you own. Every result you find for "Google News API" is a third party.
What developers want from one is clear: the top headlines of a country or a category, keyword search with date filters, and structured JSON with title, source, date, URL, and text. Three families of tools provide that, with different trade-offs. They are compared below.
GNews API is one of them: an independent news API, not affiliated with Google, whose top headlines are based on Google News rankings by category, country, and language, and whose search covers 80,000+ sources with historical data since 2020.
Google News API alternatives compared
Three ways to get Google News-style data into your code. Each one is a reasonable choice: pick by what you need to build.
| Google News RSS | SERP scraping APIs | GNews API | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Google's own feeds for an edition, a section, or a search | Services that scrape Google News result pages and return them as JSON (SerpApi, Apify, SerpHouse) | An independent news API with its own index of 80,000+ sources |
| Official Google product | Yes, but not an API: no API key, no documentation, no support | No, built by scraping Google's pages | No, not affiliated with Google. Top headlines are based on Google News rankings |
| Data per article | Title, link, date, source name | Title, link, date, source, thumbnail, position as ranked by Google | Title, description, full article content, URL, image, date, language, and source (and its country on Search) |
| Top headlines by country and category | Yes, one feed per edition and section | Yes, as Google displays them | Yes: 9 categories, 71 countries, 41 languages, based on Google News rankings |
| Keyword search | Basic | Yes, within what Google displays | Yes, with AND, OR, NOT, exact phrases, and language, country, and date filters |
| Historical data | Recent items only | Whatever Google's pages show | Since 2020 on paid plans, last 30 days on the Free plan |
| Stability | Format and limits can change without notice | Breaks when Google changes its layout, then fixed by the provider | Documented REST contract, official SDKs for Python, JavaScript, and PHP, LangChain tools, and an MCP server |
| Price | Free | Pay per result, usually per 1,000 searches | Free plan with 100 requests per day. Paid plans from €49.99/month, 10-day free trial |
| Best for | A personal project that needs a few headlines | Mirroring exactly what Google News shows on a page | Apps, feeds, monitoring, and AI agents that need structured articles and search |
Other news APIs such as NewsAPI.org, NewsAPI.ai, and The News API belong to the same family as GNews API: see how they compare.
Google News API in cURL, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and C#
There is no Google endpoint to call, so here is the request developers send instead. Create a free account, verify your email address, copy the API key from your dashboard, and run one of these. No credit card, no OAuth, no SDK required.
curl --get "https://gnews.io/api/v4/top-headlines" \ --data-urlencode "category=business" \ --data-urlencode "lang=en" \ --data-urlencode "apikey=YOUR_API_KEY"
These requests return the top business headlines of the moment, in English, based on Google News rankings. Change category for another section (general, world, nation, technology, entertainment, sports, science, or health), and add country or change lang for another edition.
Every language gets the same JSON: the number of matching articles and the list of articles, where every article carries the same fields, from title and content to image, date, language, and source. The JSON reference details each field.
Search by keyword
Swap the endpoint for search and pass your query in q. It is matched in article titles and descriptions (add in=title,description,content to search the full text too), with optional language, country, and date filters, and articles come newest first.
curl --get "https://gnews.io/api/v4/search" \ --data-urlencode "q=AI" \ --data-urlencode "lang=en" \ --data-urlencode "apikey=YOUR_API_KEY"
Prefer a library?
Official SDKs wrap both endpoints with typed responses, error handling, and retries: pip install gnews-io-python, npm install @gnews-io/gnews-io-js, or composer require gnews-io/gnews-io-php. For AI agents, pip install langchain-gnews adds top headlines and search as LangChain tools, and the hosted MCP server connects Claude Code, Cursor, or VS Code without any code.
Is the Google News API free?
Google has no news API to price. The RSS feeds cost nothing but return a few fields with no guarantees, and SERP scraping APIs charge per result. GNews API has a Free plan: 100 requests per day, 10 articles per request, articles from the last 30 days, for development, testing, and non-commercial projects, with no credit card. Paid plans start at €49.99/month with 1,000 requests per day, real-time articles, full article content, and historical data since 2020. Every paid plan starts with a 10-day free trial.
Google News search API: keywords, dates, and languages
The closest thing to a Google News search API is the Search endpoint (/api/v4/search). It queries our index of 80,000+ sources rather than Google's pages, which is what makes date filters and operators possible:
q: the query, withAND,OR,NOT, parentheses, and exact phrases in quotes, for example"artificial intelligence" AND (companies OR technology)langandcountry: the language of the article and the country of its sourcefromandto: a publication date range, since 2020 on paid planssortby:publishedAtfor the newest first, orrelevancemaxandpage: up to 100 articles per request depending on your plan, with pagination
The Query Syntax and the Search endpoint are documented in full, and the API Playground in your dashboard builds the request for you.
What you can build
Add news features to your app or platform.
A few ways developers use it:
Trending headlines
Get ranked, real-time top headlines for news feeds, front pages, and dashboards, as JSON.
Advanced search
Combine keywords with AND, OR, and NOT, and filter by language, country, and date range, for media monitoring, analytics, and RAG pipelines.
News feed for your website or app
Show a news module on your site or app, by category, language, or country, with article cards that stay up to date.
AI agents and datasets
Give an agent the day's headlines through the LangChain tools or the MCP server, or collect a recent, diverse dataset to train summarization, classification, or NER models.
Topic hubs
Build themed hubs, such as football transfers or film and TV releases, with filtered, frequently refreshed articles.
FAQ
totalArticles and an articles array where each article holds its text (title, description, content), its URL and image, its publication date and language, and its source. Most migrations swap the base URL, rename a few query parameters, and remap those fields. The documentation and the official SDKs cover the rest. /api/v4/search) finds articles by keyword, with operators, a date range, language and country filters, sorting, and pagination. The Top Headlines endpoint (/api/v4/top-headlines) returns the current top headlines of a category: general, world, nation, business, technology, entertainment, sports, science, or health. Looking for something else? See all frequently asked questions.
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