📰 Google News Lite API

Fast, low-cost Google News monitoring through a lightweight Google News API. 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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🔌 Integrations: Build a Google News API Monitoring Pipeline

A single run answers one question ("what is the news on OpenAI today?"). The real value comes from running this Google News API on a schedule, so fresh headlines land in your stack every hour or every morning without anyone clicking Run. See the full list of Apify platform integrations.

Tasks and Schedules (the core recipe). Save one task per thing you monitor (a brand, a competitor, a market topic) with its own searchTerms, then attach a schedule from the Actor's Actions, then Schedule menu. Handy cron strings: 0 7 * * * (daily at 7 AM), 0 */6 * * * (every six hours), 0 9 * * 1 (Monday mornings). One schedule can trigger many tasks at once, so a single 7 AM run refreshes every topic you track. The daily news digest task is built for exactly this.

n8n, Make, and Zapier. Wire the same pattern into a no-code flow: a schedule trigger, then this Actor, then a filter, then Slack or email. Use the Apify n8n integration, Make, or Zapier.

Store the history (Supabase). Send each run's rows into a table so a headline history accumulates and you can chart coverage over time. No-code: the n8n Actor node, then a Supabase node. In Python, each row carries searchTerm, title, link, source, snippet, date, imageUrl, and fetchedAt:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
from supabase import create_client

apify = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
supabase = create_client("YOUR_SUPABASE_URL", "YOUR_SUPABASE_KEY")

run = apify.actor("johnvc/google-news-lite-api").call(run_input={
    "searchTerms": ["OpenAI", "Apple Vision Pro"],
    "timeRange": "day",
})
rows = list(apify.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())
supabase.table("news_headlines").upsert(rows).execute()

MCP and AI agents. Add this API as a tool in Claude Code (free trial), Claude Cowork (free trial), Cursor, or any MCP client through the Apify MCP server so an agent can pull fresh headlines mid-conversation (see the Use this API from Claude section below). The feed-headlines-to-Claude task shows the setup.

Webhooks. For anything custom, fire an Apify webhook on ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED to push each run's dataset into your own service.

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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).

Input parameters

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
searchTerms	array of strings	Yes	-	One or more search terms; each is searched separately.
timeRange	string	No	day	How far back to look: hour, day, week, month, year, or any.
country	string	No	us	Two-letter country code to target, e.g. us, gb, es.
language	string	No	en	Two-letter language code, e.g. en, es, fr.
maxResultsPerSearch	integer	No	100	Maximum articles per search term (up to 100 per run).

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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

Data source: Google News.

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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🔗 Related Tools

Building a news and search monitoring pipeline? These tools from the same catalog pair well with Google News Lite:

• Google News API: the full version, for advanced query control (specific locations, Google domains, safe search, duplicate filtering, and deeper pagination) when you need more than fast bulk headlines.
• Google AI Overview API: capture the AI-generated summary Google shows for a topic, alongside the news headlines you track here.
• Google Forums API: monitor forum and community discussion of the same brands and topics, not just published news.
• Baidu Search Scraper: extend coverage to Chinese-language results when you monitor news for the China market.

Other Google News scrapers exist, such as powerai/google-news-search-scraper, but it adds a per-run start fee on top of a higher per-result price (about $0.005 per article versus $0.002 here) and shows minimal adoption, with a single review. Google News Lite charges only per article returned, with no start fee.

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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.

Can I schedule this Google News API?

Yes. Any run can be automated on a schedule. Create a saved task with your searchTerms, then attach a schedule from the Actor's Actions, then Schedule menu. Common cron strings are 0 7 * * * for daily at 7 AM, 0 */6 * * * for every six hours, and 0 9 * * 1 for Monday mornings. One schedule can trigger many tasks at once, so a single morning run refreshes every topic you follow. See the Integrations section above for the full monitoring recipe.

Should I use an API or a web scraper for Google News?

Both, and this Actor is both. An official news API is usually rate limited, quota bound, and often missing fields, while a raw web scraper returns messy HTML you have to clean. This Actor gives you the clean, structured result of a purpose-built API: call it yourself, pay per article, no quotas, and get the same JSON whether you pull one topic or a hundred.

Does Google News have an official API, and is it free?

Google does not offer a public, general-purpose Google News search API, and there is no free official endpoint for bulk headline monitoring. This Actor fills that gap: send your search terms and get structured headlines back, and you pay only per article returned, so a term with no results costs nothing. Data comes from Google News.

Can I integrate this Google News Scraper with other apps?

Yes. It connects to almost any cloud service through Apify integrations: Make, Zapier, Slack, n8n, and webhooks on ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED for custom actions. See the Integrations section above for full recipes.

Can I use the Google News API programmatically?

Yes. The Apify API runs the Actor, schedules it, and fetches datasets, and the apify-client package exists for both Node.js and Python. See the Actor's API tab for ready-made snippets.

Can I use Google News Lite through an MCP server?

Yes. Add it as a tool in any MCP client (Claude, Cursor, and others) through the hosted Apify MCP server with the Actor-specific URL https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/google-news-lite-api. In Claude Code (free trial) or Claude Cowork (free trial) your agent can then pull live headlines in the conversation. See the Apify MCP docs.

What is media monitoring, and how does this help?

Media monitoring is the practice of tracking mentions of a brand, person, product, or topic across news outlets. This Actor is a low-cost building block for it: run one or many search terms on a schedule, dedupe by link, and feed the clean headline and snippet rows into your alerting or analytics workflow.

How else can I monitor news and search results?

Pair this Actor with related tools in the same catalog: the full Google News API for advanced query control, the Google AI Overview API to capture AI-generated topic summaries, and the Google Forums API to watch community discussion. See the Related Tools section above.

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Featured Tasks

Ready-to-run examples that show this API solving a specific problem. Each opens its own setup so you can run it on your account in one click.

• Bulk monitor news for 100 keywords at once - many search terms in one run, deduplicated to one row per article.
• Build a daily news digest feed by API - fresh headlines for your topics, ready to schedule each morning.
• Feed Google News headlines to Claude via MCP - let Claude (free trial available) pull live news inside the conversation.
• 每日中文新闻摘要(按关键词订阅) - 按关键词抓取中文新闻头条: 标题、链接、来源、摘要与时间, 一行一条。
• 批量监控品牌新闻(中文媒体) - 一次监控多个品牌或话题的中文报道: 标题、来源、链接、发布时间, 自动按链接去重。

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Last Updated: 2026.07.12