GDELT Global News & Event Tracker – Media Monitoring API

A GDELT API wrapper and global media-monitoring feed that searches worldwide news coverage by keyword, phrase, country or language and normalizes each article into a clean record: title, URL, domain, publish date, source country and language. Use it to build a brand or topic monitor, a geopolitical-risk feed, a PR-coverage tracker, or a news dataset spanning 100+ languages and countries.

Who uses it

PR and communications teams, brand and reputation monitors, risk-intelligence and geopolitical-analysis firms, researchers, and media-analytics products.

Why this is worth charging for

GDELT indexes global news in near-real time across languages — coverage most media-monitoring tools charge heavily for. Its DOC API returns compact article lists with a nonstandard date format. This actor normalizes dates to ISO, deduplicates by URL, and delivers a keyword- or country-scoped news feed you can monitor on a schedule.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "title": "Big Event Happens",
  "url": "https://news.example.com/story",
  "domain": "news.example.com",
  "seenDate": "2024-05-01T12:00:00Z",
  "sourceCountry": "United States",
  "language": "English",
  "socialImage": "https://img/x.jpg",
  "source": "GDELT"
}

Input

Field	Description
query	Keyword or phrase (GDELT query syntax supported), e.g. "electric vehicle" recall. Required.
timespan	Lookback window, e.g. 1d, 3d, 1w, 1m. Leave blank for GDELT default.
sourceCountry	Restrict to a source country code, e.g. US, GB, FR.
sourceLang	Restrict to a language, e.g. english, spanish.
sort	Result ordering.
maxRecords	Articles to return (GDELT max 250).
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.01, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• article-record — $0.005 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

Each run returns up to 250 articles for a dollar or two. A scheduled hourly brand monitor with onlyNewSinceLastRun bills only newly-seen articles, keeping ongoing cost low.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/doc service. GDELT's seendate format is normalized to ISO. No key or proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No — GDELT's DOC API is open. Just provide a query and optional filters.

Can I monitor a brand across countries?

Yes. Set your query and (optionally) sourceCountry/sourceLang, then schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun for continuous coverage tracking.

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