Financial Times News Scraper

Finance monitors, PR teams, and AI research agents use this Actor to extract Financial Times (ft.com) headline metadata — title, standfirst, authors, section, image, and publish time — from public FT RSS section feeds, with optional Bing News site:ft.com keyword discovery and public Open Graph URL enrich. Built for structured monitoring on Apify (API, schedules, datasets). Full article body remains behind the reader’s FT subscription; this Actor returns honest metadata and standfirsts only (bodyText is always null).

Best fit for this Actor

• Monitor Markets, Companies, World, Technology, Climate, Opinion, and other public FT RSS sections on a schedule
• Filter by keyword or recency window across selected sections
• Discover articles by topic via Bing News site:ft.com (FT public site search is out of scope)
• Enrich specific ft.com/content/{uuid} URLs from public OG/meta when HTML is reachable

Best fit when you need FT metadata and standfirsts. For multi-publisher news monitoring, continue with Google News Scraper. For Bloomberg section headlines and tickers, use Bloomberg News Scraper.

Practical scenario

A markets researcher selects sections home and markets, sets maxItems to 10, and schedules the run hourly. Each run returns the latest FT headlines with standfirsts and canonical /content/{uuid} URLs. The researcher filters rows where the standfirst mentions “oil” or “Fed”, then opens those URLs for full reading under their FT subscription. The Actor is the discovery layer; the subscription remains the reading layer.

Quick start input

{
  "sections": ["home", "markets", "companies"],
  "maxItems": 10,
  "searchKeywords": [],
  "sinceHours": 0
}

Input reference

Field	What it controls
sections[]	FT RSS sections (prefill: home + markets)
searchKeywords[]	Optional headline/standfirst filter
searchQuery	Bing News site:ft.com topic search
articleUrls[]	Optional ft.com URLs → public OG enrich
sinceHours	Recency filter (0 = all current feed items)
maxItems	Hard cap on billed articles (default 50, prefill 10)
proxyConfiguration	Optional; enable Residential when URL enrich needs a clearer HTML path

What data you receive

One dataset item is one FT article metadata row.

{
  "title": "Slide in oil prices drives rebound in battered government bonds",
  "summary": "Brent crude falls amid speculation about spare capacity…",
  "url": "https://www.ft.com/content/18f9e0ac-b7d9-4648-803f-3e894990c626",
  "authors": [],
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-21T10:55:57.000Z",
  "section": "home",
  "keywords": [],
  "textAvailability": "RSS_SUMMARY",
  "sourceMode": "rss",
  "bodyText": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Meaning
title / summary	Headline and standfirst/snippet
url / canonicalUrl	Canonical /content/{uuid} link
authors / publishedAt	Byline and ISO publish time when exposed
section / keywords	Section label and tags
imageUrl	Lead image when present
textAvailability	RSS_SUMMARY | SEARCH_SNIPPET | PUBLIC_SNIPPET | PAYWALLED
sourceMode	rss | search | url
bodyText	Always null in v1 (honest subscription-body contract)

Download JSON, CSV, or Excel from the run dataset. Key-value OUTPUT / RUN_SUMMARY use outcomes COMPLETE, PARTIAL, VALID_EMPTY, INVALID_INPUT, UPSTREAM_FAILED, or CONFIG_ERROR.

Use through the API

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/khadinakbar~financial-times-news-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sections":["home","markets"],"maxItems":10}'

Read rows from the run defaultDatasetId after status is SUCCEEDED. Check key-value OUTPUT.outcome for the terminal contract above.

Use with AI agents through Apify MCP

Scrape the latest Financial Times Markets and International home headlines. Cap at ten articles. Return title, standfirst, URL, publish time, and section. Keep the request metadata-only.

Inspect OUTPUT.outcome, keep url / guid as provenance, and keep maxItems small. Client setup: https://mcp.apify.com. Tool name after publish: apify--financial-times-news-scraper.

Connect the workflow

This Actor is a focused FT metadata monitor. When you need headlines across many publishers for the same keyword, then continue with Google News Scraper. When the story is Bloomberg-specific markets coverage with tickers, use Bloomberg News Scraper beside or instead of FT sections.

Pricing

This Actor uses Pay per event plus Apify platform usage. Open the live Pricing tab for current event details, and use Apify's run cost controls to keep the workflow aligned with your budget.

• apify-actor-start: $0.00005 per run
• article-found: $0.003 per saved article row

A quality prefill that returns ten articles bills one start event plus ten article-found events (~$0.03005 before platform usage). Invalid input and empty matches charge no article-found events.

Best results

• Prefer RSS sections for reliability; use searchQuery when you need a topic outside a single section feed.
• Keep maxItems low for cheap canaries; raise only after a successful small run.
• Treat URL enrich as optional — enable Residential proxy when FT article HTML needs a clearer path.
• Re-check important stories on ft.com under your own subscription before redistribution.

Design note

In my testing, FT section RSS (?format=rss) and home feeds returned stable headline/standfirst payloads without proxy, while article HTML often needed Residential for OG enrich and full body remained subscription-gated. Keyword discovery therefore uses Bing News site:ft.com rather than FT site search. That is why bodyText stays null and textAvailability is an honest enum aligned with public metadata.

Responsible use

Use public FT feed and search metadata for lawful monitoring and research. Follow Financial Times terms, copyright policy, and applicable law. FT robots.txt and copyright policy describe AI/ML training and commercial redistribution expectations — contact content.licensing@ft.com for licensing queries. You are responsible for compliance.

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd. This independent Actor is not affiliated with, associated with, or endorsed by The Financial Times Ltd. Bing is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. This independent Actor is not affiliated with, associated with, or endorsed by Microsoft.