BBC News Articles Scraper

Collect current BBC News stories as complete, structured article records ready for monitoring, research, analysis, or downstream data workflows. Each saved result includes the article text together with its canonical URL and available publication metadata.

What you can use it for

• Track current reporting across BBC News sections.
• Build a structured news dataset for research or text analysis.
• Feed article content and metadata into alerts, dashboards, or other Apify integrations.
• Collect a small, bounded set of recent stories on a schedule.

The Actor discovers stories from BBC RSS feeds, removes duplicate article URLs, fetches the linked BBC pages, and saves only complete validated articles. It covers the current inventory exposed by the selected feeds; it is not a historical archive or arbitrary BBC search tool.

Input

For a quick run, set only maxItems. The default feeds cover BBC News, World, Business, Technology, Science and Environment, and Entertainment and Arts.

{
  "maxItems": 5,
  "maxBillableResults": 5,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 15,
  "maxRetries": 2,
  "maxTransferBytes": 5242880
}

Field	Meaning	Limits
feedUrls	Optional BBC RSS feeds; built-in feeds are used when omitted	1–20 HTTPS URLs on feeds.bbci.co.uk
maxItems	Maximum complete unique articles saved	1–1,000; default 100
maxBillableResults	Optional additional saved-result and charge cap	1–1,000
requestTimeoutSecs	Timeout for each request	1–30; default 15
maxRetries	Retries after a failed request	0–3; default 2
maxTransferBytes	Overall compressed download budget	1–50 MiB; default 25 MiB

The Actor also respects the run's Apify spending limit. The effective result limit is the lowest of maxItems, maxBillableResults when supplied, and the number of results allowed by that spending limit.

Output

Results are written to the run's default dataset, one record per complete unique article:

{
  "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/example",
  "title": "Example BBC headline",
  "description": "Article summary",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-27T12:00:00Z",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-08-27T13:00:00Z",
  "authors": ["BBC News"],
  "section": "World",
  "content": "The complete extracted article text...",
  "language": "en-GB",
  "imageUrl": "https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/example.jpg"
}

Unavailable optional metadata is returned as an empty value or null. Pages missing the required URL, title, publication time, or sufficiently complete article text are omitted.

Pricing and result limits

The Actor uses Pay Per Event pricing at USD 0.0018 per successfully saved article (USD 1.80 per 1,000 results). A result is charged only when a complete, validated, non-duplicate article has been successfully written to the default dataset. Failed requests or writes, duplicates, skipped pages, and partial or invalid articles are not charged.

Use maxItems, maxBillableResults, and the Apify run spending limit to bound the number of paid results. Runtime platform usage is not passed through as a separate customer charge.

Data and operational notes

• The Actor uses public BBC RSS feeds and linked BBC article pages.
• BBC feed inventory and page markup can change, so available counts and optional metadata vary by run.
• Requests run sequentially to keep resource usage bounded.
• URL allowlists, retry limits, timeouts, and transfer limits are enforced for every run.