Google News Scraper

Search Google News and get clean, structured articles as JSON, CSV or Excel: headline (raw and with the - Publisher suffix stripped), publisher name and domain, publish time, feed rank and the real publisher URL (Google's encoded redirect links are resolved for you). Optionally extract the full article text — body, author, image, keywords and section — from the publisher's page. Works for any language and country. Pay only per article returned.

Use cases

• Media monitoring and brand mentions for any keyword, in any market
• Feeding news into AI agents, RAG pipelines and newsletters
• Competitor and industry tracking (site: and when:7d operators supported)
• Building datasets of headlines by topic, region or publisher

Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Search terms. Operators work: "exact phrase", site:reuters.com, when:7d, before:2026-01-01, after:2026-06-01
rssUrls	array	Optional Google News RSS feed URLs (topics, sections, publications)
topics	array	Optional: browse Google News' built-in sections without knowing an RSS URL — WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SCIENCE, SPORTS, HEALTH, plus the narrower sub-sections POLITICS, ECONOMY, REAL_ESTATE, JOBS, EDUCATION, AUTOS, MOVIES, MUSIC, CELEBRITIES, ARTS, SOCCER, BASKETBALL
topicsHashed	array	Optional: paste a full news.google.com/topics/<CODE>... URL (from your browser's address bar after clicking into any Google News section — a single company's page, a local section, a story cluster, anything with no name above) or just the <CODE> itself; the code is extracted automatically. Reaches every section Google has, not just the 20 named ones
excludeWords	array	Words/phrases to drop from every query, e.g. ["iphone"] on a query apple removes iPhone coverage. Same effect as typing -word yourself, just a manageable list. Applies to queries only
siteFilter	array	Restrict every query to these publisher domains, e.g. ["nytimes.com", "reuters.com"] (OR'd, filtered by Google itself — no extra requests, no under-filled results). Applies to queries only
excludeSites	array	Drop results from these publisher domains, e.g. ["pinterest.com"]. Applies to queries only
timePeriod	string	Only articles published within this window: 1h, 6h, 12h, 1d, 7d, 30d, 90d, 1y. Filtered by Google itself, so it costs no extra requests and you are never charged for articles outside the window. Applies to queries only
publishedAfter	string	YYYY-MM-DD — only articles published on or after this date. Overrides timePeriod. Applies to queries only
publishedBefore	string	YYYY-MM-DD — only articles published before this date. Overrides timePeriod. Applies to queries only
language	string	hl code such as en-US, de, fr, pt-BR, ar, ja (default en-US)
country	string	gl code such as US, GB, DE, IN (default US)
maxItemsPerQuery	integer	Up to 100 (Google's feed limit). Default 25 — decoding the real publisher URL is a 2-request round trip per article, and Google's per-IP rate limit on that endpoint has gotten slower recently, so 50+ articles can now take 4-5 minutes
decodeUrls	boolean	Resolve the publisher URL for each article (default true). Forced back on if fetchArticleBody is on — see FAQ
fetchArticleBody	boolean	Open each publisher page and extract the full article text, author, image, keywords and section (default false)
articleBodyMaxChars	integer	Truncate articleBody to this length (default 20000). Does not affect extractTickers, which always scans the full fetched text before truncation
extractTickers	boolean	Pull stock tickers into a tickers array from the title (and article body, if fetchArticleBody is on). Rule-based, no extra request, costs nothing extra (default false)
maxResults	integer	Total cap across queries
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy for Google/publisher requests (default: on). Rotating IPs is the real fix for Google's URL-decode rate limit — see FAQ

Output (one item per article)

{
  "title": "Apify raises new funding to scale web data platform - TechCrunch",
  "titleClean": "Apify raises new funding to scale web data platform",
  "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/apify-funding/",
  "googleNewsUrl": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi...",
  "source": "TechCrunch",
  "sourceUrl": "https://techcrunch.com",
  "sourceDomain": "techcrunch.com",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-02T07:00:00.000Z",
  "snippet": "Apify raises new funding to scale web data platform",
  "relatedArticles": [
    { "title": "Apify closes funding round", "source": "Reuters", "googleNewsUrl": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi..." }
  ],
  "position": 1,
  "query": "apify",
  "topic": null,
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US"
}

A few of these are worth knowing about:

• titleClean — Google News always appends - Publisher to the headline. title keeps it exactly as Google sends it; titleClean is the same headline with that suffix removed, which is what you usually want in a dashboard or digest.
• sourceDomain — the publisher's bare domain (www. stripped), so you can group or filter by outlet without parsing URLs yourself.
• position — the article's 1-based rank inside its own feed, so Google's relevance/recency ordering survives export and re-sorting.
• relatedArticles — when Google groups several outlets covering the same story, the other outlets land here with their own title, source and Google News URL. Costs no extra requests. The fill rate depends heavily on feed type (live-measured 2026-10-01 across 240 real articles): a keyword search (queries) rarely gets it — 0-3% of results across 3 test queries ("stock market", "Tesla", "artificial intelligence") — but topic/section browsing (topics) gets it on almost every item: 97-100% across WORLD, NATION and TECHNOLOGY (3 separate runs, 30-50 articles each). If you want related-coverage data, browse by topic rather than search by keyword.
• snippet — kept for backward compatibility, but be aware Google News RSS ships no real article summary: this field always repeats the headline. For an actual summary, turn on fetchArticleBody and read articleDescription.

With fetchArticleBody: true each item also carries:

{
  "articleBody": "Apify, the web scraping and automation platform, said on Tuesday...",
  "articleWordCount": 812,
  "articleDeclaredWordCount": null,
  "articleBodyComplete": true,
  "articleBodyIncompleteReason": null,
  "articleBodyTruncated": false,
  "articleBodySource": "jsonld",
  "articleAuthor": "Jane Doe",
  "articleImage": "https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/apify.jpg",
  "articleKeywords": ["funding", "web scraping"],
  "articleSection": "Startups",
  "articleDescription": "The platform raised a new round to...",
  "articlePublishedAt": "2026-09-02T07:00:00Z",
  "articleModifiedAt": "2026-09-02T09:14:00Z",
  "articleFetchStatus": "ok"
}

articleFetchStatus always tells you where the text came from or why it is missing: ok, blocked (publisher refused the request, e.g. hard paywall), no-body (page had no readable article text), error (request failed) or no-url (Google's redirect could not be resolved). Body extraction reads the page's Article JSON-LD first and falls back to the article paragraphs; publishers that serve different HTML to different clients are retried under several request fingerprints, and the one that works is reused for the rest of that publisher's articles.

With extractTickers: true each item also carries:

{ "tickers": ["TSLA"] }

Rule-based and free (no extra request): it catches a cashtag ($TSLA), an exchange prefix/suffix (NASDAQ:AAPL, AAPL:NASDAQ), or a capitalized name immediately followed by (TICKER) — the most common real convention in financial headlines, e.g. "Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)". It deliberately does not match a bare capitalized word (TSLA Stock Rises) — that would flood results with false positives from ordinary acronyms (WSJ, IPO, EV, SEC, UN...), which are also excluded by name when they appear in the (XXX) position. The tradeoff: plain-text mentions with no notation at all are missed. tickers is always [] when nothing matches, never omitted.

Pricing

result — charged per article returned. Failed feeds and duplicates are free, and full article text costs nothing extra. HTTP-only, no browser, so runs finish in seconds.

The niche's two second-and-third largest Store listings by users are easyapi (2,736 users, easyapi/google-news-scraper) and data_xplorer (2,336 users, data_xplorer/google-news-scraper-fast) — correction: earlier versions of this paragraph called these two "the niche's two Store leaders by users", which was wrong; the actual leader is lhotanova/google-news-scraper at 3,201 users, priced and compared in the fourteenth-sweep paragraph below. Counts re-verified live 2026-10-16. easyapi charges a flat $0.005/result plus a $0.09/GB Actor-start fee at every tier (it does not tier down) — 2.5x our FREE-tier $0.002/result, widening to 5x our GOLD+ $0.001/result. data_xplorer is tiered ($0.004 at FREE/BRONZE, $0.00375 at SILVER) but ties us exactly at GOLD, PLATINUM and DIAMOND ($0.001/result each) — a previous version of this paragraph called both leaders "2-2.5x our price" across the board, which only held at the bottom two tiers; corrected here. Neither Store listing advertises topic/section browsing, custom RSS feeds, site include/exclude filters, related-coverage clustering, stock ticker extraction, or the leaked-article date-window protection documented above, all of which this Actor ships at the lower-or-tied price. Verified live 2026-10-03.

Two more rivals outrank the one previously named as "third-biggest" and genuinely undercut us at specific tiers — not caught before because competitor_audit on this Actor was last run at cycle 1070, before either grew past memo23: automation-lab (647 users, automation-lab/google-news-scraper) charges a $0.005 Actor-start fee plus a tiered per-result rate from $0.0023 (FREE) down to $0.00056 (DIAMOND). The start fee keeps us cheaper at FREE/BRONZE/SILVER/GOLD regardless of run size, but its lower per-result rate overtakes ours past ~25 results at PLATINUM and past just ~11 results at DIAMOND — above those sizes it is the cheaper option. It has no URL decoding (url is still Google's raw, undecoded redirect link), no full-article-text extraction, no ticker extraction, no site/word filters beyond queries, and only 8 of this Actor's 20 topic codes. crawlerbros/google-news-scraper — named here at 504 users, matching our rate at FREE/GOLD+ but undercutting at BRONZE/SILVER once a run amortized its $0.005 start fee — is gone from the Store as of 2026-10-09 (GET /v2/acts/crawlerbros~google-news-scraper now 404s, a removal rather than a rename, confirmed directly against the API). A fresh resweep of this niche's BRONZE/SILVER tiers is still owed to find whatever the current cheapest listing is there; this retracts the specific undercutter without claiming nothing beats us at those tiers. A third mid-size listing, scrapestorm/google-news-scraper-fast-cheap-pay-per-results (759 users), is bigger than memo23 by user count but is not a threat on either axis: a flat $0.00499/result with no tiers — pricier than us at every tier including FREE — and no features beyond basic keyword search. Verified live 2026-10-03.

A wider Store sweep (11 terms, 215 matching listings) turned up a rival bigger than both automation-lab and crawlerbros that this README had never named: epctex/google-news-scraper (600 users, 885 builds, 8 reviews at 5 stars, 25 bookmarks — a long-established, actively-maintained listing, not a fly-by-night one). Its live pricingInfos show it was automatically migrated to Apify's FREE pricing model on 2026-10-02 (Apify's own "rental sunset" auto-migration, not a deliberate price cut by its owner) — $0/result at any volume, undercutting this Actor at every tier including FREE. Its input schema is materially narrower, though: startUrls/query/language/date/maxItems/decodeArticleUrls only — no built-in topic/section codes (you must already have a topic feed URL in hand), no excludeWords/siteFilter/excludeSites operators as structured fields, no full-article-text extraction, no ticker extraction, and no leaked-date-window protection. It does resolve the real publisher URL (decodeArticleUrls, equivalent to this Actor's decodeUrls). Because Apify's auto-migration reassigns a price rather than reflecting a chosen one, this disclosure will be re-checked on the next audit in case epctex sets its own paid tiers later. Verified live 2026-10-03.

Three more listings were checked and are not price threats once compared feature-for-feature: solidcode/google-news-scraper (123 users, 27 new in the last 30 days) advertises "$0.9 / 1K" in its Store description — its GOLD+ base rate of $0.0009/result — but that figure excludes URL resolution; its publisher_url_resolved event charges the same tiered rate again, so a run that actually resolves publisher URLs (the equivalent of this Actor's default decodeUrls: true) pays $0.003/result at FREE and $0.0018/result at GOLD+, pricier than this Actor at every tier once compared apples-to-apples. george.the.developer/google-news-monitor (144 users, 21 new in the last 30 days) brands itself for "real-time alerts" but is a standard Apify Actor under the hood, charging a flat $0.003/article found with no start fee — pricier than this Actor at every tier, a different marketing angle rather than a different price or technical capability. data_xplorer/google-news-scraper (145 users, a second listing from the same vendor as the 2,171-user -fast one already named above) adds a $0.005/GB Actor-start fee on top of a tiered per-result rate — correction: not "the same" rate as its sibling, as a prior version of this paragraph said. It now runs $0.004 FREE, $0.003 BRONZE, $0.002 SILVER, $0.001 GOLD/PLATINUM/DIAMOND (its sibling is $0.004 FREE/BRONZE, $0.00375 SILVER, $0.001 GOLD+) — a steeper taper than its sibling, but the start fee alone still makes it strictly dearer than this Actor at every tier, including the tiers where its sibling ties us, so the competitive conclusion is unchanged. Verified live 2026-10-03.

Another smaller rival is worth naming for its features, not its size: memo23 (140 users, memo23/google-news-scraper, created June 2026 and growing fast — 52 of its 140 users joined in the last 30 days; counts re-verified live 2026-10-16) genuinely out-features this Actor in two places — named-entity extraction (people/organizations/locations, not just stock tickers) and an optional Cloudflare-bypass flag for hard-anti-bot publisher pages, neither of which this Actor has. But it unbundles what this Actor gives away free: $0.0025/result plus $0.0005 for resolving the publisher URL and $0.0005 for body enrichment ($0.0035/article fully enriched vs. this Actor's flat $0.002 with both included), plus a $0.05/GB start fee this Actor doesn't charge. Its site filter is include-only — no equivalent to excludeSites — and it has no built-in list of Google News' 20 named sections; you need a section's URL already in hand to paste it in, where this Actor just takes topics: ["BUSINESS"]. Verified live 2026-10-02.

Three more never-named rivals surfaced by this cycle's audit, two of them genuine undercutters at realistic volumes: fetch_cat/google-news-scraper (33 users, 12 new in the last 30 days, counts re-verified live 2026-10-16 — the fastest-growing small listing in that sweep) charges a $0.005 one-time start fee plus a tiered per-result rate from $0.00086837 (FREE) down to $0.00021143 (DIAMOND) — its start fee keeps us cheaper on single-article runs, but it crosses under our flat $0.002 FREE-tier price past ~5 articles per run and under our $0.001 GOLD+/DIAMOND price past ~7. Its input schema (queries/maxItemsPerQuery/dateRange/country/language/ceid/dedupe) has no URL decoding, no topic/section browsing, no site/word filters, no ticker extraction and no leaked-date-window protection. andok/google-news-scraper (110 users, 22 new in the last 30 days, marketed for "brand mentions, competitor coverage, and crisis keywords" monitoring) tiers both its one-time start fee ($0.01 FREE down to $0.0014 DIAMOND) and its per-result rate ($0.001 FREE down to $0.00014 DIAMOND) — crosses under our FREE-tier price past ~10 articles per run and under our GOLD+/DIAMOND price past just ~2; it is also the thinnest schema found in this niche (queries/maxItems/language only, nothing else). xmolodtsov/google-news-scraper (28 users, re-verified 2026-10-18) is a second listing in this niche auto-migrated to Apify's FREE pricing model during the same 2026-10-02 rental sunset as epctex above — $0/result at any volume — but unlike epctex it ships topics/topicsHashed and a fetchArticleDetails flag, closer to this Actor's own feature set than epctex's bare keyword search; still no ticker extraction and no leaked-date-window protection. Like epctex, this disclosure will be re-checked next audit in case either owner sets their own paid tiers later. Verified live 2026-10-03.

A full niche-unnamed diff against all 216 Store matches (not just the top 10 by users — this README's previous audits had never run that wider diff) found four more genuine undercutters, none named above, that beat this Actor's price at every tier, not just past a crossover point: vortex_data/google-news (33 users, 6 new in the last 30 days) charges a flat $0.0007/result with no start fee — 65% below our FREE-tier $0.002 and 30% below our GOLD+ $0.001, at any run size. Its input schema lists 90+ properties (many synonyms for the same field — query/searchTerms/keyword/searchQuery/q all present at once, a sign of an auto-generated or merged schema), including full-text extraction, entity extraction and a named monitoring/watch mode on paper — but the sheer field count makes it unclear how much of that is actually live-wired, so treat the feature breadth as unverified until tested, not as a confirmed gap. thirdwatch/google-news-scraper (64 users, 13 new in 30 days, "Fast, Pay Per Result, No Proxy") tiers $0.0015 (FREE) down to $0.0009 (GOLD+) — also cheaper at every tier — but its schema (queries/maxResults/language/country/timeRange/resolveUrls) has no topic/section codes, no site/word filters, no ticker/entity extraction, and no leaked-date-window protection. logiover/google-news-scraper (21 users, re-verified 2026-10-18) tiers $0.001 (FREE) down to $0.0007 (GOLD+) — cheaper at every tier — with a similarly thin schema (queries/topic/geoLocation/topHeadlines/language/country/maxArticles/timeWindow/fromDate/toDate/includeSources/excludeSources/resolveUrls/extractThumbnails): topic browsing and source filters exist but no word-exclude, no ticker extraction, no leaked-date-window protection. codetr/apify-google-news-scraper (52 users, 3 new in 30 days, markets itself "Cheap") tiers $0.0009 (FREE) down to $0.00065 (GOLD+) per article — cheaper per-article at every tier — but carries a flat $0.05 Actor-start fee this Actor doesn't charge, so it only actually wins once a run amortizes that fee: past ~45 articles/run at FREE, past ~143 articles/run at GOLD+. Its schema (maxItems/searchQuery/googleCountry/uiLanguage/resultsLanguage/resultsCountry/timePeriod/custom date range/noAutocorrect/filter/extractFullText) has no topic/section codes, no site/word filters, no ticker extraction, no leaked-date-window protection. All four prices verified live via pricingInfos/pricingPerEvent, 2026-10-04.

Five smaller listings, verified live 2026-10-04, beat only this Actor's bottom tiers, not GOLD+/PLATINUM/DIAMOND (where this Actor prices at $0.001 — correction: an earlier version of this sentence called that "among the lowest found in this niche", which the full sweep below disproves; at least eight live listings price under $0.001 at GOLD+): epicscrapers/google-news-scraper (36u) tiers $0.0015 down to $0.001, tying us from GOLD up; joyouscam35875/rss-news-aggregator (30u), akash9078/google-news-scraper (33u, multi-event structure that nets to roughly $0.001/result once its small per-item and start-fee events are added in) and scrapesmith/google-news-scraper (24u, $0.001/result plus a $0.01 start fee) are all flat $0.001/result — exact parity with our GOLD+/PLATINUM/DIAMOND rate, cheaper only at our FREE/BRONZE/SILVER tiers; sian.agency/google-news-scraper (19u) is flat $0.0015/result at every tier plus a $0.005 start fee — cheaper than our FREE/BRONZE/SILVER, dearer than our GOLD+. None of these five were compared feature-for-feature this cycle (time budget); left as a follow-up in queue.md.

The audit above stopped at the rivals it had time to price. This one did not: every one of the 72 unnamed Store matches with 3+ users was live-priced (217 matches total in an 11-term sweep; the cohort has grown well past the ~25 the previous audit left un-priced). 22 of the 72 undercut this Actor at some tier — the honest headline is that this is a crowded, aggressively-priced niche and price is not where this Actor wins. The four biggest never-named undercutters: google-serp-scraper-api/google-serp-scraper (26u, 3 new/30d) charges $0.00001/result plus a $0.00005 start fee — two orders of magnitude below our FREE-tier $0.002 — but it is a general SERP tool where Google News is one of three mode values, with a 7-field schema (query/queries/mode/language/country/maxResults/useApifyProxy): no topic/section codes, no custom RSS feeds, no site/word filters, no URL decoding, no full-article text, no ticker extraction, no leaked-date-window protection. simple.actors/google-search (delisted — the Apify API returned 404 for this Actor on 2026-10-16, so it is no longer a live competitor in this niche; the rest of this sentence is the dated 2026-10-07 record and should not be read as current) moved to Apify's FREE model on 2026-10-04 — by its owner's own choice (the live record carries a 2026-09-20 advance notice, not the "rental sunset" auto-migration reason seen on epctex), so $0/result at any volume; it does resolve links (resolveLinks) and reads Google News' own feeds for its news mode, but has no topic/section codes, no excludeWords/siteFilter/excludeSites, no article body, no tickers, no date-window protection. om_kh/google-news-scraper (14u) was FREE from 2026-07-28 through 2026-10-12. Forecast landed, re-verified live 2026-10-16: its scheduled PAY_PER_EVENT switch is now in effect at a flat $0.002/article — parity with our FREE tier and dearer than every tier from BRONZE down — so it no longer undercuts us at any tier. It does ship one thing this Actor lacks, a per-run spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd), alongside monitorEnabled/monitorId. devisty/google-news-ppr (0 new/30d, 2 builds) tiers $0.001 (FREE) down to $0.0005 (GOLD+) with no start fee — cheaper at every tier at any run size — but carries the thinnest schema in the whole niche at four fields (type/lr/keyword/max): no country, no date filter, no URL decoding, no body, no tickers. All prices verified live 2026-10-05 from pricingInfos/pricingPerEvent.

The one worth watching is small but closely feature-matched: peerless_columbine/google-news-scraper-api (3 new/30d, 23 builds) tiers $0.00075 (FREE) down to $0.0003 (GOLD+) with no start fee — 2.7x below this Actor at FREE and 3.3x below at GOLD+ — and its 35-field schema is the nearest thing to this Actor's own found in the niche, reusing our exact field names (decodeUrls, topics, siteFilter, excludeWords) plus extractFullText/includeImages/resolvePublisherUrls. Two of its fields are named crawlerbrosInput and dataXplorerInput — it carries other Actors' input blocks verbatim, both of them rivals named earlier in this section — and it duplicates synonyms heavily (keyword/keywords/queries, maxArticles/maxResultsPerQuery/maxItems, since/timeframe/dateRange/dateFrom/dateTo), the same merged-or-auto-generated signature as vortex_data above; so treat its breadth as unverified until tested, not a confirmed feature gap. It has no rssUrls, no excludeSites, no ticker extraction and no leaked-date-window protection. The remaining 17 undercutters, for completeness — cheaper at every tier with no meaningful start fee: lofomachines/google-news-scraper ($0.0012→$0.0005), accountable_eel/google-news-lookup ($0.001→$0.0005, and the broadest monitoring schema of this group at 23 fields, with include/exclude keywords and sources, an only-new deltaMode and webhook notification), apt_marble/google-news-search-topics-scraper (flat $0.0008, has topics and sites), deriverge/google-news-scraper ($0.0015→$0.00075, has topics/feeds/topStories/newOnly), and webscrap18/google-news-article-scraper — a third listing auto-migrated to FREE in the 2026-10-02 rental sunset alongside epctex and xmolodtsov, so like those two it will be re-checked next audit. Cheaper only past a crossover, because of a start fee: santamaria-automations/google-news-scraper ($0.001→$0.00087 + $0.001 start, wins past ~2 articles/run at FREE/BRONZE/SILVER and ~8 at GOLD+), q_services/google-news-scraper (flat $0.0005 + $0.005 start, past ~4 at FREE and ~11 at GOLD+), themineworks/google-news (flat $0.001 + $0.005 start, FREE/BRONZE/SILVER only, past ~6-11). Cheaper only at our FREE/BRONZE/SILVER tiers and parity-or-dearer at GOLD+: saswave/google-news-scraper (14u), cirkit/google-news-scraper (9u) and scrapersdelight/google-news-scraper at flat $0.0015; sourabhbgp/google-news-scraper (11u), crw/google-news-scraper-1k-results-1 (6u) and sapph1re/google-news-date-window-export (4u) at flat $0.001; lergassy/google-news-scraper ($0.0015→$0.0011). Cheaper only at PLATINUM/DIAMOND: phantom_coder/google-news-scraper ($0.004→$0.0006, dearer than us from FREE through GOLD) and fetch_cat/google-news-journalist-lead-finder (14 new/30d, a $0.12 start fee plus $0.0023→$0.00056, so it only wins past ~601 articles/run at PLATINUM and ~273 at DIAMOND — and it is an outreach-lead product, not a news feed). The other 49 of the 72 are dearer than this Actor at every tier, and one (magicfingers/social-listening-intelligence, 40u) has no pricing in effect at all. Verified live 2026-10-05.

A follow-up sweep found the niche has kept growing (220 Store matches now, up from 217) but is otherwise clean: every one of the 50 never-named listings with 3+ users was live-priced again, including several far bigger than any rival named above — futurizerush/google-news-scraper (118u), johnvc/GoogleNewsAPI (111u), sync-network/awesome-google-news-scraper (109u), powerai/google-news-search-scraper (74u) and khadinakbar/google-news-scraper (74u) among them — none of which undercut this Actor; all price from $0.0025 to $0.15/article with no tier dropping below our $0.001 GOLD+ rate (johnvc/google-news-lite-api, 13u, comes closest, tiering $0.002→$0.001941, still above us). Two Store matches on title alone are a different product entirely and excluded from this niche by live description — datapilot/angel-investor-contact-finder and datapilot/investor-presentation-scraper, both investor-research tools with no Google News connection. One genuine new undercutter, small but real: bovi/google-news-scraper (3u) charges a flat-ish $0.0009 (FREE) down to $0.000855 (DIAMOND) per result plus a negligible ~$0.00005 start fee — cheaper than this Actor at every tier — but ships only title/source/published-date/a raw RSS link and a parse_confidence score: no topic/section codes, no URL decoding, no site/word filters, no full-article text, no ticker extraction, no leaked-date-window protection. All prices verified live 2026-10-06 from pricingInfos/pricingPerEvent.

Eleventh sweep (2026-10-07): the niche kept growing again — 228 Store matches now, up from 220 — and the unnamed tail grew with it (174 listings never named, up from 50 at the last full-cohort cut). Own price re-verified live first: unchanged, $0.002 FREE down to $0.001 GOLD+, no start fee. Every one of the 42 unnamed listings with 3+ users was live-priced end to end (reusing bin/_batch_price_gn.py). Three genuine findings, none previously named: a DataForSEO-powered multi-engine SERP tool bills its Google News mode per page of up to 10 results ($0.005 FREE down to $0.004 GOLD+, plus a one-time $0.001-$0.0008 start fee) — worked out per article, that is roughly $0.0004-0.0005, undercutting this Actor at every tier, but it is a general organic/maps/news SERP product with no topic/section codes, no custom RSS feeds, no site/word filters, no full article text, no ticker extraction and no leaked-date-window protection, the same shape of exclusion already applied to google-serp-scraper-api above. A second, confusingly similar listing to the already-named simple.actors/google-search (plural owner handle) but from a different owner handle, singular simple.actor, bills Google News coverage per search request read ($0.0003, up to 100 stories each) plus per story delivered ($0.00005) plus a one-time $0.00005 start fee — at any real run size that nets to a small fraction of a cent per article, undercutting this Actor at every tier, with the same feature gaps as its plural near-namesake (no topic/section codes, no excludeWords/siteFilter/excludeSites, no article body, no tickers, no date-window protection). Third, a small listing auto-migrated to Apify's FREE pricing model on 2026-10-06 — the day before this sweep — making it a fourth rental-sunset FREE migration in this niche alongside epctex, xmolodtsov and webscrap18 above; its description claims title/source/date/link/snippet plus an optional deep-scrape for full text/author/images/keywords, but (like the other three) it has not been feature-tested live, only read from its Store listing, and will be re-checked next audit in case it sets its own paid tier. The rest of the 42-listing cohort did not undercut, including several bigger than any rival named in this section — s-r/google-news (65u), scrapeio/google-news-scraper (61u), scionic_dev/financial-news-sentiment (51u, a sentiment-analysis product, different shape), viralanalyzer/rss-news-intelligence (45u), shoya/cheap-google-news-scrapper (44u, dearer than this Actor at every tier despite the branding), practicaltools/apify-google-news-scraper (43u), scrapesage/google-news-scraper (37u, re-verified live 2026-10-16) and cloud9_ai/google-news-scraper (22u) among them — all priced from $0.003 to $0.02/article, no tier below our $0.001 GOLD+ rate. Per the standing rule, counts under 20 users are not published for the three new findings above since totalUsers churns too fast at that resolution to stay accurate; the price and feature comparison are the durable claims. All prices verified live 2026-10-07 from pricingInfos/pricingPerEvent.

Twelfth sweep (2026-10-07): own price re-verified live first — unchanged, $0.002 FREE down to $0.001 GOLD+, no start fee. All 48 unnamed listings with 3+ users were live-priced (reusing bin/_batch_price_gn.py). Three full undercutters, none previously named: scrapeai/google-news-scraper is on Apify's FREE pricing model — $0/article at any volume. fascinating_lentil/google-news-scraper charges a flat $0.0008/article plus a negligible $0.00005 start fee, beating this Actor's $0.001 GOLD+ floor outright. ninhothedev/google-news-scraper is the deepest found this sweep, a flat $0.0005/article plus the same $0.00005 start fee. None of the three ship topic/section codes, custom RSS feeds, site/word filters, ticker extraction, or the leaked-date-window protection documented above — the same gap shape as every full undercutter already named in this niche.

Four more tie or beat only this Actor's lower tiers: blazing_stake/google-news-scraper and rupom888/google-news-scraper both charge a flat $0.001/article (rupom888 adds the $0.00005 start fee), exactly tying this Actor's GOLD+/PLATINUM/DIAMOND rate while undercutting FREE/BRONZE/SILVER. fanciful_geode/google-news-es matches that same flat $0.001 + $0.00005 start, but scopes to Spanish-language/LatAm coverage only — a narrower product, not a general substitute. betterscrapers/the-better-google-news-scraper tiers $0.00149 (FREE) down to $0.00125 (GOLD+) plus a $0.00005 start fee — cheaper than this Actor through SILVER, dearer from GOLD+ up. kaz_kakyo/google-news-scraper bills two separate per-unit events (a source-poll charge and a per-new-article-delivered charge, each $0.001) plus the usual start fee — a monitoring/alert shape rather than a flat per-article rate, so its effective cost per article depends on poll frequency and is not a clean tier-for-tier match; noted here as a caveat, not an undercutter claim.

This sweep also caught a bug in our own tooling, not a rival's pricing: check-price-superiority's headline_price() picked a rival's one-time $0.00005 Actor-start fee as its "price" whenever that rival's owner flagged apify-actor-start as isPrimaryEvent — true for two listings surfaced this sweep, delectable_incubator/google-news-scraper-low-cost (real price $0.00239 FREE / $0.00119 GOLD+, dearer than this Actor at every tier, not an undercutter) and the fanciful_geode listing named above. Fixed by excluding apify-actor-start from the primary-event branch the same way cycle 1373 already excluded it from the fallback branch. Fleet-wide re-run after the fix: 1603 named-rival prices compared, 532 cheaper than us (down from 552 pre-fix — the 20-rival swing was entirely this bug, not real price drift), 0 undisclosed anywhere. Verified live 2026-10-07.

Thirteenth sweep (2026-10-09): own price re-verified live first — unchanged, $0.002 FREE down to $0.001 GOLD+, no start fee. All 39 unnamed listings with 3+ users were live-priced (reusing bin/_batch_price_gn.py), niche now at 236 Store matches. Zero new undercutters: the cheapest of the 39 — solidscrape/google-news-scraper, santhej/google-news-scraper, scrape.badger/google-news-scraper, gio21/google-news-scraper, hichemdev/google-news-scraper and complex_intricate_networks/google-news-sentiment-scraper — all land at exactly $0.002/article, tying this Actor's FREE tier and dearer than BRONZE/SILVER/GOLD+/PLATINUM/DIAMOND; the remaining 33 of the 39 priced above $0.002. The three rental-sunset FREE migrations named in earlier sweeps (epctex/google-news-scraper, xmolodtsov/google-news-scraper, webscrap18/google-news-article-scraper) are all still on Apify's FREE pricing model, with no scheduled paid-tier switch found live. Verified live 2026-10-09.

Fourteenth sweep (2026-10-16): own price re-verified live first — unchanged, $0.002 FREE / $0.0018 BRONZE / $0.0015 SILVER / $0.001 GOLD+PLATINUM+DIAMOND, a single result event, no start fee. Niche now at 304 Store matches (up from 236). This sweep's finding is the one that matters most in this section: the largest listing in the niche had never been named here at all, through thirteen prior sweeps — lhotanova/google-news-scraper (3,201 users) — bigger than the easyapi and data_xplorer listings named at the top of this section, and by a wide margin the most-used Google News Actor on the Store (3,674,448 lifetime runs, 77,781 in the last 30 days at a 99.99% success rate, 13 reviews averaging 4.59 stars, 79 bookmarks — an established, actively-maintained listing). It was missed because it sat in this niche as a $20/month rental since November 2022, and rentals carry no per-result rate for a price comparison to catch. All three listings' user counts verified live 2026-10-16.

That changed on 2026-10-14, two days before this sweep: it left rental for Apify's pay-per-event model. Its live rates are a $0.005 Actor-start fee (FREE/BRONZE; $0.004 SILVER, $0.00325 GOLD+ — charged per GB of run memory, minimum one), plus $0.002/article (FREE/BRONZE), $0.0016 (SILVER), $0.0013 (GOLD+), plus two optional add-ons at $0.001 each (FREE/BRONZE; $0.0008 SILVER, $0.00065 GOLD+): resolved-url to turn the Google News redirect into the real publisher URL, and article-page for the article page's own content. This Actor is cheaper than the niche leader at every tier on a like-for-like basis. Compared base-rate only, lhotanova ties this Actor at FREE ($0.002) and is dearer at every tier below it ($0.002 vs our $0.0018 BRONZE, $0.0016 vs $0.0015 SILVER, $0.0013 vs $0.001 GOLD+). Compared properly — this Actor resolves publisher URLs by default (decodeUrls: true) and includes article body free, where lhotanova bills both as add-ons — a run that resolves URLs costs $0.003/article at FREE (1.5x this Actor's $0.002) and $0.00195 at GOLD+ (1.95x this Actor's $0.001), before its start fee, which this Actor does not charge at all.

On features the comparison was genuinely mixed when first written, flagging two of its capabilities as gaps on this side; both are now closed. lhotanova's input schema is 10 fields (query, topics, topicsHashed, language, maxItems, fetchArticleDetails, fetchArticlePage, dateFrom, dateTo, openEndedDateRange) against this Actor's 19. Update 2026-10-16: added topicsHashed — paste any news.google.com/topics/<CODE> URL (or just the code) to target a section with no named code at all, same as lhotanova's field of the same name, verified live against a real hashed-topic feed. openEndedDateRange turned out not to be a gap at all: this Actor's publishedAfter/publishedBefore were always independent fields, so setting only one already gives an open start or end to the window — it just wasn't called out by that name before. Conversely lhotanova has no custom RSS feed input (rssUrls), no excludeWords, no siteFilter/excludeSites publisher include/exclude, no country/region targeting at all (only language), and no stock-ticker extraction (extractTickers) — and it charges separately for the URL resolution and article text this Actor bundles free. Treat its per-article rate as the thing to watch: it is two days into a new pricing model and its owner may re-tier. Pricing figures verified live 2026-10-16 from pricingInfos/pricingPerEvent and stats.

Tips

• Combine queries with when:1d to get only fresh news for daily runs.
• Use excludeWords to drop off-topic coverage that shares a keyword with your query (e.g. exclude iphone when tracking apple as a company, not a product line).
• Google News' RSS search only understands the hour, day and year units in a time filter. when:1m and when:12m come back as an empty feed, not an error — which looks exactly like "no articles matched". That is why timePeriod offers 30d, 90d and 1y rather than a "last month" option. If you type when:/after:/before: directly into a query, that query keeps your operator and timePeriod is not applied on top of it.
• publishedAfter/publishedBefore are Google's own after:/before: operators, and Google evaluates the day boundary in its locale, not in UTC. Expect the edges to be loose by a few hours — a before:2026-09-05 query can return an article stamped 2026-09-05T01:51Z (observed live). If you need a hard UTC cut-off, filter the publishedAt field yourself after the run.
• Combining publishedAfter/publishedBefore with excludeSites trips a Google bug: the feed starts leaking articles months to years outside the window (measured live: 7 in 100, including a 2011 article, on a June-2026 window). when:-style timePeriod is unaffected, and so are excludeWords and siteFilter. This Actor drops those leaked articles for you — anything more than a day outside your window is discarded before it is decoded or charged, and the run status message tells you how many. The one-day allowance is what keeps the legitimate timezone-edge articles above from being thrown away with them. Same protection applies if you type after:/before: directly into a query yourself instead of using the publishedAfter/publishedBefore fields (measured live: 3 in 100 on a query -site:pinterest.com shape) — the Actor reads the dates out of your query text and polices that window too.
• topics covers more than the eight sections Google shows in its own nav. Twelve narrower sub-sections are served by the same endpoint but are not linked anywhere in the Google News UI: POLITICS, ECONOMY, REAL_ESTATE, JOBS, EDUCATION, AUTOS, MOVIES, MUSIC, CELEBRITIES, ARTS, SOCCER, BASKETBALL. Use them when BUSINESS or ENTERTAINMENT is too broad to monitor — ECONOMY and REAL_ESTATE are far tighter feeds than BUSINESS, and SOCCER/BASKETBALL beat SPORTS for a single-league watch. All 20 are verified live; an unrecognised code returns an empty feed rather than an error, so the Actor warns you instead of silently returning nothing. For any section not in this list of 20 — a single company's page, a local section, a story cluster — use topicsHashed instead: open it in Google News, copy the URL (or just the /topics/<CODE> part), and paste it in.
• For any section not in the list above, pass its feed URL in rssUrls directly, e.g. https://news.google.com/rss/headlines/section/topic/TECHNOLOGY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en.
• Turn off decodeUrls for the fastest runs if you only need headlines and sources.
• fetchArticleBody adds one request per article, so it is slower — but it costs no extra: you are still charged once per article returned, body or no body.
• Hard-paywalled publishers come back as blocked. Metered ones are the tricky case — they return a teaser that looks like a real article; filter on articleBodyComplete !== false rather than guessing from articleWordCount.

FAQ

I set excludeWords / siteFilter / timePeriod and some rows ignored it — why? Those are Google search operators, so they only exist on the search endpoint. topics, topicsHashed and rssUrls are fixed feeds: Google serves them whole, and there is nothing to attach an operator to. A run that mixes both — say queries: ["nba"] plus topics: ["SPORTS"] — filters the query rows and returns the topic rows untouched. The run log now says so explicitly, naming how many of your feeds are fixed, so you can see it in the run rather than infer it from the output. To filter a section, search it instead: a query like nba site:espn.com when:1d covers the same ground with every operator honoured. Why is url null on some articles? Google occasionally rate-limits the redirect-resolving endpoint per IP; googleNewsUrl still works, and the run status message tells you how many articles were affected. Every run routes through rotating Apify Proxy IPs by default specifically to avoid this — if you turned proxyConfiguration off, turn it back on first. Does fetchArticleBody cost more? No — you pay once per article returned whether or not the body was fetched. I set decodeUrls: false but url still came back resolved — why? fetchArticleBody was also on. The article body lives on the publisher's page, not Google's redirect link, so fetching it needs the real URL regardless of what decodeUrls says — the run turns decoding back on for you (logged as a warning in the run) rather than silently returning no body. Verified live: decodeUrls: false + fetchArticleBody: true still returns a resolved url, e.g. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-robotaxi-early-charging-strategy-scrappy-dna/, not a news.google.com redirect. If you need the raw undecoded link anyway, read googleNewsUrl, which is always present. Turn fetchArticleBody off too if you specifically want to skip URL resolution. Why does articleFetchStatus say blocked or no-body? The publisher likely paywalls the article or serves it without readable paragraph text; both are reported explicitly instead of a silently empty articleBody. How do I know the articleBody is the WHOLE article and not a paywall teaser? Read articleBodyComplete. A metered paywall is the dangerous case: it serves the first few hundred words as ordinary paragraphs, so the body clears every length check and articleFetchStatus is a perfectly honest ok — nothing about the row looks wrong. articleBodyComplete is three-state on purpose: true = we observed the whole article arrive, false = we observed that it did not (articleBodyIncompleteReason names which observation), null = the page carried no completeness signal, so we are not guessing either way. Never read null as a problem, and never read false as a guess. The reasons are:

• paywalled-section-missing / paywalled-section-empty — the page's own structured data names the paywalled region by CSS selector (Google's paywall markup), we looked, and that region was either absent from the HTML we received or held no article text and what we did extract is teaser-sized (≤220 words). Both of those had to be true. You got the free part only.
• short-vs-declared-wordcount — the publisher declared a wordCount (also surfaced as articleDeclaredWordCount) and we extracted under 60% of it. Both numbers ride on the row so you can apply your own threshold.
• paywall-declared-unverifiable — the page is gated but nothing we can check came back conclusive, so completeness is genuinely unknown. This is a null, not a false.

Two things this deliberately does not do, both because we measured them failing:

• It does not treat isAccessibleForFree: false as proof of a teaser. theatlantic.com carries that flag on every article yet served us a complete 3,479-word body. Metered paywalls gate the Nth read, so the flag describes the publisher's intent, never what your request received — we use it only to find out where to look.
• It does not treat an empty paywalled region as proof either. scmp.com points its selector at .piano-metering__paywall-container, the client-side paywall overlay, which is correctly empty on a free read — trusting that alone flagged two complete SCMP articles (849 and 1,123 words) as truncated. That is why false needs a second, independent observation and null is a first-class answer here. Why did a run return 0 articles with status SUCCEEDED? The status message distinguishes "Google returned nothing for this query" from "every result was a duplicate of another feed" from "the request failed" — check it before assuming your query is wrong. What's the difference between siteFilter and typing site: into queries? None functionally — siteFilter just OR's multiple domains together (site:a.com OR site:b.com) and applies them to every query in your list, so you don't have to hand-append the operator to each one. What happens if Google's RSS feed has a transient blip mid-run? Every feed and article-URL-decoding request is retried up to 3 times on a connection-level failure (measured at roughly 1 fresh request in 4 for HTTP/2 faults across this fleet, 2026-09-21) before that feed is given up on and named in the status message — a single blip no longer silently empties a query's results into erroredFeeds. Do I need to quote a multi-word excludeWords phrase myself? No — pass the phrase plain, e.g. ["stock market"], and it is quoted for you. Fixed 2026-10-20: pre-quoting it yourself (["\"stock market\""]) used to send Google a doubled quote that silently broke the exclusion (confirmed live: a pre-quoted "stock market" left every one of 10 economy-query results containing that phrase, where the plain form correctly excluded it from all 10). Either form now works.

Related guides

Engineering write-ups behind this Actor:

• How we resolve Google News's encoded redirect links
• Why "JSON-LD only" article extraction fails on real news sites
• Google News RSS's <description> field carries no article summary — here's what's actually in it
• A Try-for-free click shouldn't cost a first-time buyer $1.26 and five minutes
• Substack, Apple Podcasts, Google News and Hacker News — four free APIs where the first response isn't the finished product — how this Actor's second-step trap compares to the other three content platforms we scrape.

Only publicly available data is collected. Questions or feature requests: support@fetchsmith.com. Also available as a hosted API at https://fetchsmith.com/tools/google-news-scraper

Source code: https://github.com/Fetchsmith/fetchsmith/tree/main/actors/google-news-scraper