📰 Google News Lite API

Fast, low-cost Google News monitoring. Send one or many search terms and get back the matching headlines and snippets as structured JSON, one row per article: title, link, source, snippet, date, and image. Filter by time range, country, and language. Pay per article, with no setup fee. MCP-ready so Claude and other AI agents can call it as a tool.

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📋 What this API returns

One row per article. Each row carries:

Field	Description
searchTerm	The search term this article matched.
title	The article headline.
link	Direct URL to the article.
source	The publisher name (for example BBC, Reuters, TechCrunch).
snippet	A short excerpt or summary of the article.
date	Relative publication date as shown by Google News (for example "2 hours ago").
imageUrl	Thumbnail image URL, when one is available.
position	Rank of the article within the results for its search term.
country, language, timeRange	The targeting used for the search.
fetchedAt	ISO 8601 timestamp of when the row was produced.

Results are de-duplicated by link within each search term.

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🎯 Use cases

• Media monitoring. Track coverage of a brand, product, or person across thousands of publishers in one run.
• PR and reputation tracking. Watch how a story develops over the past hour, day, or week.
• Competitive and market intelligence. Monitor news about a market, technology, or topic as it breaks.
• Sentiment and trend pipelines. Feed clean headline and snippet text into an NLP or analytics workflow.
• AI agent workflows. Drive this API over MCP from Claude (see below) to pull fresh headlines in-conversation.

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⚙️ Input examples

Monitor a single topic

{
  "searchTerms": ["OpenAI"],
  "timeRange": "day"
}

Monitor several topics at once

{
  "searchTerms": ["Apple Vision Pro", "OpenAI", "electric vehicles"],
  "timeRange": "week",
  "maxResultsPerSearch": 50
}

Country and language targeting

{
  "searchTerms": ["inteligencia artificial"],
  "country": "es",
  "language": "es",
  "timeRange": "month"
}

Provide at least one term in searchTerms. Each term is searched separately and the API returns one row per article. timeRange accepts hour, day, week, month, year, or any (no time limit).

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📤 Example output

[
  {
    "result_type": "news_article",
    "searchTerm": "OpenAI",
    "position": 1,
    "title": "OpenAI announces new model with improved reasoning",
    "link": "https://www.example-news.com/openai-new-model",
    "source": "Example News",
    "snippet": "The company says the update brings significant gains on multi-step reasoning and coding tasks.",
    "date": "3 hours ago",
    "imageUrl": "https://www.example-news.com/img/openai.jpg",
    "country": "us",
    "language": "en",
    "timeRange": "day",
    "fetchedAt": "2026-05-29T12:00:00+00:00"
  },
  {
    "result_type": "news_article",
    "searchTerm": "OpenAI",
    "position": 2,
    "title": "What the latest release means for developers",
    "link": "https://www.example-tech.com/openai-developers",
    "source": "Example Tech",
    "snippet": "Developers get higher rate limits and a cheaper tier for high-volume workloads.",
    "date": "5 hours ago",
    "country": "us",
    "language": "en",
    "timeRange": "day",
    "fetchedAt": "2026-05-29T12:00:00+00:00"
  }
]

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💰 Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price	When it fires
article_processed	$0.002	Once per news article returned (one dataset row).

$0.002 per article works out to $2 per 1,000 articles. There is no setup fee and no monthly subscription, so you pay only for the articles you actually get.

Examples:

• 100 articles costs $0.20.
• 1,000 articles costs $2.00.
• A search term that returns no articles costs $0.

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🔌 Use this API from Claude (MCP)

This Actor is MCP-server-compatible, so Claude Code (free trial), Claude Cowork (free trial), Cursor, and other MCP clients can call it as a tool through Apify's hosted MCP server.

Add it with this Actor-specific URL:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/google-news-lite-api

Setup walkthrough:

Apify MCP integration docs: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp

New to Claude Code or Claude Cowork? Start a free trial here: https://claude.ai/referral/uIlpa7nPLg

Then ask Claude:

"Use Google News Lite to get the latest headlines about 'OpenAI' from the past day, and list the sources."

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🚀 How to get started

1. Open the Actor and add one or more searchTerms.
2. Optionally set timeRange, country, language, and maxResultsPerSearch.
3. Run it and read the results from the dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel, or API).

View on Apify Store

Prefer code? A ready-to-run Python example, plus MCP setup guides for Claude and Cursor, lives on GitHub: github.com/johnisanerd/Apify-Google-News-Lite-API

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🔎 Need more than headlines and snippets?

Google News Lite is built for fast, cheap, high-volume headline monitoring. It returns headlines and snippets, not full article bodies.

• For advanced query control (specific locations, Google domains, safe search, duplicate filtering, and deeper pagination), use the full Google News API.
• For complete article text, pair the link from each row with any article-content extractor.

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❓ FAQ

How do I search several topics in one run? Add multiple entries to searchTerms. Each term is searched separately and contributes its own rows, tagged with searchTerm.

Why did a term come back with no articles? Some terms have no recent coverage in the chosen timeRange. Widen the range (for example from day to week or any), and that term will return a no_results row instead of articles.

Can I get more than 100 articles per term? Each term returns up to 100 articles per run. To go deeper, run the term on its own or narrow it with a more specific query.

Do empty searches cost anything? No. You are billed per article returned, so a term with no results costs nothing.

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Last Updated: 2026.05.29