🔍 ESPN Keyword Finder

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Features

• 🔍 Multi-keyword tracking — monitor any number of keywords or phrases across ESPN articles in a single run
• 📰 Headline vs. body breakdown — see whether each keyword appeared in the headline, the article content, or both
• 🎯 Case-sensitive matching (optional) — toggle exact-case matching on or off depending on your use case
• ✂️ Contextual match snippets — every match returns the surrounding text with the keyword clearly highlighted
• ✍️ Author metadata — get the name, email (when public), and ESPN profile link for each article's author(s)
• 📊 Per-keyword and aggregate stats — total occurrences, headline occurrences, content occurrences, and matching-article counts, both per keyword and across your whole keyword set
• 🗂️ Clean, structured JSON output — ready to export to CSV/Excel, pipe into Google Sheets, or feed into your own analytics pipeline
• 🗞️ Optional section filter — narrow your search to a specific ESPN news section (e.g. NFL, NBA, MLB, Soccer) instead of scanning all of ESPN

Use Cases

• Media monitoring & PR — track how often your athlete, team, brand, or sponsor is mentioned in ESPN coverage, and where
• Fantasy sports platforms — surface player buzz, injury mentions, or lineup news the moment it's published
• Marketing & sponsorship analytics — measure sponsor name visibility across ESPN's editorial content over time
• Journalism & newsroom research — quickly find every ESPN article referencing a topic, player, or storyline you're covering
• Academic & sports-media research — analyze coverage trends, author patterns, or topic frequency over a season
• Fan engagement apps — power "trending now" or player-mention feeds using real ESPN article data
• Competitive content analysis — benchmark how much coverage a topic gets versus rival storylines

How to Use ESPN Keyword Finder

1. Click the blue Try for free button in this page.
2. You may be asked to sign-in or create a FREE Apify account (no credit card required).
3. Configure the Actor input. DO NOT change the Actor RAM. 8 GB is the highly recommended setting for fast and efficient runs.
4. Click the green Start or Save and start button to run the Actor.
5. View the results in the output tab once the run finishes. You can choose to view the results as JSON or a table (JSON is preferred since the data has a nested data structure).

Actor Input Explanation & Example

Field Name (JSON)	Field Name (Input Form)	Type	Required	Description
keywords	Keywords	array	Yes	An array of the keywords you want to search for.
section	Section	string	No	The ESPN news section to search inside. Set it to all to search the entire website. Defaults to soccer.
matchCase	Match Case	boolean	No	If enabled, the keyword search will be case-sensitive. Default false.

Input Example:

{
    "keywords": ["messi"],
    "matchCase": false,
    "section": "all"
}

Actor Output Example

{
  "caseSensitive": false,
  "keywordOccurrences": [
    {
      "keyword": "messi",
      "totalOccurrences": 2230,
      "headlineOccurrences": 178,
      "contentOccurrences": 2052,
      "matchingArticlesCount": 171
    },
  ],
  "matchingArticlesCount": 171,
  "matchingArticles": [
    {
      "id": 49433484,
      "url": "https://www.espn.com/story/_/id/49433484",
      "headline": "How Spain won the World Cup without a marquee goal scorer or elite defense",
      "publishedAt": "2026-07-24T08:00:00Z",
      "keywordMatches": [
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...eadlock even tighter against Argentina and Lionel [Messi] -- the defending champs and the best player of al..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "... of the World Cup Golden Boot race, Argentina had [Messi] and Spain had none.\nShould that really have added..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...moved to Arsenal and might have been the best non-[Messi] creator in the world.\nThe 2018 World Cup gets rem..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...World Cup in 2022, they didn't win because Lionel [Messi] decided to finally fulfill his potential at age 3..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...fill his potential at age 35. No, this version of [Messi] was a lot worse than the previous versions of Mes..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...ssi was a lot worse than the previous versions of [Messi] we saw at previous World Cups. No, the big differ..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...ners. Not only could they all move the ball up to [Messi], they were all rangy enough to cover for his lack..."
        }
      ],
      "authors": [
        {
          "name": "Ryan O'Hanlon",
          "email": "ryan.ohanlon@espn.com",
          "espnProfile": "https://www.espn.com/contributor/ryan-ohanlon"
        }
      ]
    },
    ...
  ]
}

For more information on the Actor output, check the Actor output page.

Actor Pricing Explanation

This Actor uses a pay-per-event (PPE) pricing model. The details of the events and their prices are shown below. Prices below are not final and may be discounted for premium users.

Event Name	Price	Event Description
section-scraped	$0.03	A scrape of a single ESPN news section.
matched-article	$0.0025	A single matched article for your keywords.

For more info, check the Actor pricing page.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: What if ESPN Keyword Finder fails? Would I still be charged?

A: No, you only get charged for successful runs. Note that runs can be successful and still not find any matching articles for your keyword(s), in which case you will only be charged a fee according to the number of news sections that were scraped.

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Q: How do I know where a keyword matched?

A: Each match includes a location field showing whether it appeared in the headline or the article content, along with a matchSnippet — a short excerpt of surrounding text with the matched keyword wrapped in square brackets, e.g. ...the [Lakers] pulled off a comeback....

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Q: Is keyword matching case-sensitive?

A: It's your choice. You can set the matchCase input argument to true if you want case-sensitive matching. A caseSensitive property in the run output tells you which mode was used — leave it false for broader matching, or set it to true if you need exact-case results (e.g. distinguishing "Bulls" the team from "bulls" the animal). The default for this argument is false.

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Q: What author information is included?

A: Each article includes an authors array with the author's name, and email and ESPN profile URL when publicly available. If ESPN doesn't expose that info for a given author, those fields return null.