Google News Intelligence Scraper

Turn Google News into a daily intelligence feed for brand monitoring, competitor tracking, PR alerts, SEO research, and market trend discovery.

This Actor does not just dump headlines. It returns clean, flat, business-ready records with freshness, source, country edition, query context, deduplication, and lightweight intelligence labels so teams can plug the output straight into Sheets, Notion, Slack, n8n, dashboards, CRMs, or alerting workflows.

Why this scraper exists

Most news scrapers solve the easy problem: “give me article links.”

Customers usually need the harder, recurring problem:

• What changed about my brand today?
• Which competitors are getting press?
• Which product launches, lawsuits, funding events, security issues, or partnerships should I care about?
• What sources are repeatedly covering a topic?
• Can I run this every morning and get a clean dataset without babysitting it?

That is the product angle here: daily monitoring, not one-off scraping.

Best use cases

• Brand monitoring — track mentions for your company, founders, products, and campaigns.
• Competitor intelligence — monitor rival launches, funding, partnerships, layoffs, and legal issues.
• PR and media monitoring — discover who is writing about your market.
• SEO and content research — collect fresh headlines and angles for a topic.
• Investor / analyst workflows — follow public-company news, earnings, M&A, regulatory events, and security incidents.
• Automation feeds — schedule daily runs and send high-signal results to Slack, email, Notion, Airtable, or n8n.

What you get

Each result is a flat record:

• query — your original search term
• searchQuery — the exact Google News query used
• country — Google News edition, e.g. US, GB, CA
• language — language code, e.g. en
• rank — ranking inside the feed for that query/country
• title — article headline
• source — publisher name
• sourceUrl — publisher URL when Google provides it
• publishedAt — normalized ISO timestamp
• ageHours — article age at scrape time
• freshnessBucket — breaking_0_6h, today_6_24h, recent_1_3d, week_3_7d, or older
• isRecent — true when the article is under 24 hours old
• intelligenceType — rule-based business label such as funding, product_launch, legal_regulatory, security, partnership, earnings_financial, m_and_a, hiring_people, review_analysis, or general
• url — article URL / Google News URL, or canonical URL when article metadata fetching is enabled
• googleNewsUrl — original Google News link
• guid — Google News item ID
• snippet — cleaned article summary from the RSS feed
• metaDescription, image, textPreview — optional fields when article-page fetching is enabled
• scrapedAt — run timestamp

Input options

queries

Brands, competitors, products, people, markets, or advanced Google News queries.

Examples:

["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Apify", "\"AI agent\" funding", "site:techcrunch.com startup"]

mode

Controls how queries are interpreted:

• raw — keep your query exactly as written. Best for advanced operators.
• exactPhrase — wraps each query in quotes.
• allWords — requires all query words.

countries

Google News editions to query. Examples: US, GB, CA, AU, DE, FR.

language

Language code, default en.

maxItemsPerQuery

Maximum results per query/country. Google News RSS usually returns up to about 100.

freshnessHours

Only keep articles published within this many hours. Default: 168 for the last 7 days. Use 24 for daily alerts or 0 to disable freshness filtering.

includeArticleText

Optional. Visits article pages to extract canonical URL, meta description, OpenGraph image, and a lightweight text preview. Leave off for fast, reliable daily monitoring. Turn on when you need richer metadata.

classifyIntent

Adds business intelligence labels using transparent rules.

deduplicate

Removes duplicate stories across query/country combinations.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Apify"],
  "mode": "raw",
  "countries": ["US", "GB"],
  "language": "en",
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 25,
  "freshnessHours": 168,
  "includeArticleText": false,
  "classifyIntent": true,
  "deduplicate": true
}

Example output item

{
  "query": "OpenAI",
  "searchQuery": "OpenAI",
  "country": "US",
  "language": "en",
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "Example headline about OpenAI",
  "source": "Example News",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-01T01:00:00.000Z",
  "ageHours": 1.5,
  "freshnessBucket": "breaking_0_6h",
  "isRecent": true,
  "intelligenceType": "product_launch",
  "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/...",
  "snippet": "Clean article summary...",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-01T02:30:00.000Z"
}

Reliability notes

• Uses Google News RSS endpoints, so it is lightweight and fast.
• No login required.
• Browser automation is not required.
• Proxies are usually unnecessary.
• Best scheduled daily or hourly for recurring monitoring workflows.

Recommended schedules

• Brand monitoring: every 6–12 hours
• Competitor intelligence: daily at 7am
• Breaking news / crisis monitoring: hourly
• SEO content research: weekly

Marketplace differentiation

This Actor is positioned against generic Google News scrapers by focusing on:

• cleaner flat output
• daily monitoring use cases
• source and freshness fields
• deduplication across query/country combinations
• business signal labeling
• optional article-page metadata
• README and schema designed for non-technical buyers

FAQ

Is this the same as Google Alerts?

No. Google Alerts sends emails. This Actor returns structured data you can automate, store, filter, enrich, and push into your own workflows.

Can I track competitors every day?

Yes. Put competitor names in queries, create an Apify task, and schedule it daily.

Does it scrape full article text?

By default, no. It collects Google News RSS data for speed and reliability. Enable includeArticleText for lightweight page metadata and previews.

Can I use Google News search operators?

Yes. Use mode: raw and write advanced queries such as "AI agent" funding, site:techcrunch.com robotics, or OpenAI OR Anthropic.