# Google News Scraper — Search & Topic Headlines RSS API (`plainfetch/google-news-scraper`) Actor

Search Google News or pull a topic's headlines (World, Business, Technology, Sports...) in any language and country. Returns headline, source, publish date and a link to each article. You only pay per article delivered.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/plainfetch/google-news-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Plainfetch Studio](https://apify.com/plainfetch) (community)
- **Categories:** News, AI, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

$2.00 / 1,000 articles

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

Search [Google News](https://news.google.com) or pull a topic's headlines — World, Business,
Technology, Sports and more — in any language and country, and get back structured articles
instead of a web page. **Google News Scraper** is a **Google News API alternative** built
directly on Google's own public RSS feeds: give it a search query or a topic, and get one
dataset item per article, ready to filter, sort, or feed into another tool.

### What can you do with it?

- **Monitor a brand or topic.** Track every mention of your company, a competitor, or an
  industry term as it appears on Google News, in the language and country edition you choose.
- **Build a news digest.** Pull a topic's front page (Technology, Business, Science...) on a
  schedule and turn it into a newsletter, a Slack digest, or a dataset for another workflow.
- **Feed AI agents and NLP pipelines.** Call this Actor from the Apify API, an integration, or
  an MCP-connected AI agent so it can look up recent news on a subject as one step in a larger
  workflow — summarization, sentiment analysis, research.
- **Track publisher coverage.** See which outlets are covering a story and when, using the
  `source` and `publishedAt` fields.

### What data do you get?

Each article Google News returns produces one dataset item:

| Field           | Type           | Description                                                                        |
| --------------- | -------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `title`         | string         | The headline, with the trailing " - Source" removed.                               |
| `source`        | string | null | The publisher's name, e.g. `"BBC News"`.                                           |
| `sourceUrl`     | string | null | The publisher's site, taken from the feed's `<source url="...">` attribute.        |
| `publishedAt`   | string | null | ISO 8601 publish date, or `null` if the feed didn't include one.                   |
| `googleNewsUrl` | string         | Google News' own link for this article — open it in a browser to read the article. |
| `query`         | string         | The search query or topic name that produced this article.                         |
| `language`      | string         | The language code used for this run.                                               |
| `country`       | string         | The country/edition code used for this run.                                        |
| `error`         | object | null | Always `null` for a delivered article; present for consistency with other Actors.  |

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel. Here is real,
unedited output from a run with `{"queries": ["artificial intelligence"], "timeRange": "7d"}`:

```json
[
  {
    "title": "What is AI, how do apps like ChatGPT work and why are there concerns?",
    "source": "bbc.com",
    "sourceUrl": "https://www.bbc.com",
    "publishedAt": "2026-09-14T16:09:56.000Z",
    "googleNewsUrl": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiWkFVX3lxTFBiVlVDbllHd2t2NVB2YjJQYkQwOEF6ZzhqRVhyNmNQRGlzSTkzbkVrYUtLV20wMzFrWDktM0VFQXUzZEtseC0ybTRYX0xjUjI0QkZNX0M2Z3oyZw?oc=5",
    "query": "artificial intelligence",
    "language": "en",
    "country": "US",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "title": "Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters",
    "source": "The Economist",
    "sourceUrl": "https://www.economist.com",
    "publishedAt": "2026-09-16T18:47:08.000Z",
    "googleNewsUrl": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMixwFBVV95cUxNOVE2WlNjSlVyUjdJZzRYT1ZTSlI1cWFHdHJYcHhMNnREaXYzRzhINE8xWHZIZmh2TTFaOGllS0lTVU5sNDctUzhuOXpNQi1BbjBwalduUkE3SllUbEp3ZTFveEVZajZwOGRSVXhDaS02bnVCMkM3OWdBZTd5STl4a2dBbjNidGhpSlQ1OXlCanZRaXpoay02TU45cXk5b2c5dndkQnRCVHdCbUxvV1ljTkNtMmY4aDFnUEFHNm5iMGdhWjB4SHNR?oc=5",
    "query": "artificial intelligence",
    "language": "en",
    "country": "US",
    "error": null
  }
]
```

### How much does it cost?

You pay **$0.002 per article delivered** ($2 per 1,000). Failed queries are never charged. No
start fee.

| Articles delivered | Cost  |
| ------------------ | ----- |
| 100                | $0.20 |
| 1,000              | $2    |
| 10,000             | $20   |

Real example: the run above (`{"queries": ["artificial intelligence"], "timeRange": "7d",
"maxItemsPerQuery": 10}`) delivered 10 articles and cost **$0.02**.

### Input

See the **Input** tab for the full configuration. The minimal input is one query or one topic:

```json
{
  "queries": ["artificial intelligence"],
  "timeRange": "7d"
}
```

- **`queries`** / **`topics`** — provide at least one of either. `queries` are free-text
  searches; `topics` are one or more of `WORLD`, `NATION`, `BUSINESS`, `TECHNOLOGY`,
  `ENTERTAINMENT`, `SPORTS`, `SCIENCE`, `HEALTH`. **Duplicate entries are processed once**:
  each list is reduced to its distinct entries first, ignoring surrounding space and letter
  case for queries, so `"ai"` and `"AI"` are one query, fetched and billed once, not twice.
- **`language`** / **`country`** (optional, default `"en"` / `"US"`) — the language and
  country edition of Google News to read.
- **`timeRange`** (optional) — restrict search queries to the last `"1h"`, `"1d"`, `"7d"` or
  `"30d"`. Ignored for topics.
- **`dateFrom`** / **`dateTo`** (optional, `YYYY-MM-DD`) — restrict search queries to a date
  window instead. Ignored when `timeRange` is set.
- **`maxItemsPerQuery`** (optional, default `50`, 1 to 100) — how many articles to keep from
  each query's or topic's feed.
- **`requestDelayMs`** (optional, default `250`) — courtesy pause before each request to
  Google News.

### Limitations — read this first

Google News returns **at most about 100 items per feed**, however narrow or broad the query —
`maxItemsPerQuery` cannot get you more than the feed itself contains.

**Google News links are not resolved to the publisher's final URL.** `googleNewsUrl` is exactly
the link the feed gives you — it works fine in a browser (Google decodes and redirects it
client-side there), but it is not the publisher's own URL, and this Actor does not run a
browser to resolve it. A plain server-side HTTP request to that link only ever lands back on
`news.google.com` (via an intermediate Google consent/redirect page), so there is no reliable
way to get the final URL without a browser — this Actor does not attempt to fake one.

Results reflect Google News' own ranking and selection for the language/country edition you
chose — this Actor does not re-rank, deduplicate across publishers, or fetch full article text.

**A query or topic whose feed could not be fetched leaves no row in the dataset.** Unlike this
studio's other Actors, every item here is an article: there is no per-query summary row, so a
query that was blocked, timed out, or returned an unreadable feed simply contributes nothing.
Which ones failed is in the **run log** (one warning per failure, naming the query or topic);
the `RUN_SUMMARY` record in the key-value store carries only counts — `failed` and a tally per
error category — never the names. If you need to know exactly which entries produced nothing,
compare the `query` field of the articles you got back against the list you submitted, or read
the log. Nothing that failed is ever charged.

### FAQ

**Is this legal?** We can't give you legal advice, but here is exactly what the Actor does: it
reads Google News' public RSS feeds — a format Google publishes specifically for machines to
read, the same feeds any feed-reader app fetches — and returns the headline, source and link
already in them. It does not log in, does not get around any block, and does not collect
personal data. You are responsible for the search terms you submit and for how you use the
results.

**Where does the data come from?** Directly from `news.google.com/rss/...`, Google's own public
RSS endpoints for search results and topic headlines. No scraping of the Google News web app,
no undocumented API.

**How do I use this from the API or an AI agent (MCP)?** Call it like any other Apify Actor: via
the [Apify API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2), the JavaScript or Python client, an integration,
or an MCP-connected AI agent that has access to your Apify Actors. Pass the same `queries` /
`topics` input and read the results back from the default dataset.

**What happens if I hit my spending cap?** The run stops cleanly: it finishes the article
already being processed, writes everything it has, and reports `chargeLimitReached: true` in the
run summary. Nothing already produced is lost, and nothing beyond the cap is charged.

### Changelog

**0.1** — Initial release.

# Actor input Schema

## `queries` (type: `array`):

Free-text searches, e.g. "artificial intelligence". You can combine time filters right in the text if you leave Time range empty, e.g. "artificial intelligence after:2026-01-01". Provide at least one query or topic.

## `topics` (type: `array`):

Pull a topic's headlines instead of (or in addition to) a search. Provide at least one query or topic.

## `language` (type: `string`):

Two-letter language code for the results, e.g. "en", "es", "fr".

## `country` (type: `string`):

Two-letter country code for the results/edition, e.g. "US", "GB", "ES".

## `timeRange` (type: `string`):

Restrict search results to the last hour, day, week or month. Leave empty for no restriction, or use Date from / Date to instead.

## `dateFrom` (type: `string`):

Only articles published on or after this date. Format YYYY-MM-DD. Ignored when Time range is set.

## `dateTo` (type: `string`):

Only articles published on or before this date. Format YYYY-MM-DD. Ignored when Time range is set.

## `maxItemsPerQuery` (type: `integer`):

How many articles to keep from each query or topic's feed (Google News returns at most ~100 per feed).

## `requestDelayMs` (type: `integer`):

Courtesy pause before each request to Google News.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "queries": [
    "artificial intelligence"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "country": "US",
  "timeRange": "7d",
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 20,
  "requestDelayMs": 250
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

## `runSummary` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "queries": [
        "artificial intelligence"
    ],
    "timeRange": "7d",
    "maxItemsPerQuery": 20
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("plainfetch/google-news-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "queries": ["artificial intelligence"],
    "timeRange": "7d",
    "maxItemsPerQuery": 20,
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("plainfetch/google-news-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "queries": [
    "artificial intelligence"
  ],
  "timeRange": "7d",
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 20
}' |
apify call plainfetch/google-news-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,plainfetch/google-news-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/lgLKAesZAcVSXUwzF/builds/tRmfvksQitnIimDh5/openapi.json