Global News Monitor — GDELT, 65+ Languages

Brand and PR monitoring is a well-established paid category (Meltwater, Cision). GDELT indexes worldwide news coverage in 65+ languages and exposes it free and keyless — the honest free alternative for headline-level coverage tracking.

Two output modes

• articles (default) — one row per news article: headline, outlet, country, language, timestamp.
• summary — one row per query: how much coverage, and where it concentrates (top outlets, top countries, languages). Often the more useful answer than 200 headlines to read.

Input

{ "queries": ["Tesla", "Rivian"], "timespan": "7d" }

One query per line — a phrase may contain a comma. Optional sourceCountry and language narrow the search.

Sample output (articles mode)

{
  "matchedQuery": "Tesla",
  "title": "테슬라, 中 FSD 데이터센터 폐쇄설 부인",
  "url": "https://zdnet.co.kr/view/?no=20260827113219",
  "domain": "zdnet.co.kr",
  "language": "Korean",
  "sourceCountry": "South Korea",
  "seenAt": "2026-08-27T03:15:00Z"
}

Typical uses

• Brand / PR monitoring — track coverage volume and which outlets and countries are actually carrying the story.
• Competitive intelligence — compare share of coverage between your brand and a competitor over the same window.
• International coverage tracking — GDELT's real strength: coverage in languages and markets an English-only tool never surfaces.

Pricing

$0.002 per row.

⚠️ Read before you act — the rate limit is real

• GDELT allows one request every 5 seconds, and answers with a plain-text notice (not JSON) when exceeded — verified live, repeatedly. This actor paces itself to that limit: a 10-query run deliberately takes ~50 seconds. That's by design, not a stall.
• Exceeding the limit can trigger an extended cooldown, not just a 5-second one — observed live during development. If you see rate_limited in the problems report, space your runs further apart rather than retrying immediately.
• Coverage is headline-level — title, outlet, country, language, URL. GDELT does not provide full article text through this endpoint.
• timespan covers GDELT's rolling index (roughly the last few months), not the full historical archive.

FAQ

• Do I need an API key? No — GDELT's DOC API is free and keyless.
• Why is my run slow? Deliberate pacing to GDELT's 5-second limit — see above. Fewer queries per run finish faster.
• Why non-English results? That's the point — GDELT indexes 65+ languages. Use the language input to restrict if you want English only.

Related actors

• Google News Scraper — English-focused, faster, no rate-limit pacing; use it when you don't need GDELT's multilingual global reach.
• AI Brand Visibility Tracker — how AI assistants describe your brand, the complement to how news outlets cover it.