BBC News Search & Article Scraper

What does BBC News Search & Article Scraper do?

BBC News Search & Article Scraper turns any keyword into a ready-to-use dataset of BBC News search results - complete with the full article text of every single item, not just the headline and snippet. Point it at a keyword such as ukraina, and within seconds you get titles, URLs, descriptions, topics, publish dates, and the entire article body, byline, section, and word count for every matching article, video, and live page, all in one run. Try it instantly on the Actor's Try page - no coding required.

Running it on the Apify platform gives you full API access, scheduling for recurring keyword monitoring, one-click integrations (Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, and more), automatic retries, and run monitoring - so you can plug fresh BBC coverage straight into your own pipeline without maintaining any scraping infrastructure yourself.

Why use BBC News Search & Article Scraper?

• Media monitoring - track how a topic, brand, country, or public figure is covered on one of the world's most-cited news outlets.
• Research & analysis - build a keyword-tagged corpus of full-text BBC articles for NLP, sentiment analysis, or academic research.
• Content aggregation - feed a newsletter, dashboard, or internal knowledge base with structured BBC coverage on the topics that matter to you.
• Competitive/PR tracking - get notified the moment BBC publishes something new about a company, event, or keyword by scheduling recurring runs.

How to use BBC News Search & Article Scraper

1. Click Try for free (or Start) on the Actor page.
2. Enter your Search keyword (e.g. ukraina).
3. Set Maximum results to how many items you want.
4. Click Start. The Actor searches bbc.com for your keyword, then automatically opens every result to pull its full article text - all in one run.
5. Export the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or your preferred format, or connect it to an integration.

Input

The Actor takes a single JSON input, configured through the Input tab or via the API.

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	string	yes	Keyword to search on bbc.com/search.
maxResults	integer	no (default 30)	Maximum number of search result items to return, each enriched with full article text (BBC exposes roughly the first 250-300 per keyword).

Example input:

{
  "searchQuery": "ukraina",
  "maxResults": 30
}

Output

Each dataset item is one search result, already enriched with its full article detail. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
  "title": "Ireland announces €125m support package for Ukraine",
  "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg0m1dylevo",
  "description": "Micheál Martin is in Kyiv for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.",
  "contentType": "article",
  "topics": ["Europe"],
  "byline": "",
  "section": "Europe",
  "wordCount": 221,
  "fullText": "Ireland is to provide a further €125m (£106m) in support to Ukraine next year...",
  "imageUrl": "https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/49eb/live/462a5650-8688-11f1-b60e-a7e0943a9c78.jpg",
  "firstPublished": "2026-07-23T12:20:34+00:00",
  "lastUpdated": "2026-07-23T12:20:38+00:00"
}

Data table

Field	Description
title	Headline of the article/video/live page.
url	Full bbc.com URL of the item.
description	Short standfirst/summary.
contentType / subtype	BBC content type (article, video, live) and subtype.
topics	Topic tags.
byline	Author/contributor, when credited.
section	BBC section the article belongs to.
wordCount	Article body word count.
fullText	Full article body text.
imageUrl	Main image URL.
firstPublished / lastPublished / lastUpdated	ISO 8601 timestamps.

Pricing / Cost estimation

This Actor uses Apify's Pay per result pricing: $2 per 1,000 results (see the Actor's Monetization tab for the exact current rate). Each search result item, already enriched with full article text, counts as one result. The Apify free tier's monthly platform credit is enough to try the Actor and run small keyword searches at no extra cost.

Tips or advanced options

• BBC's search backend caps how deep it paginates for a given keyword (typically around 250-300 results); setting maxResults higher than that will simply return everything available.
• Lower maxResults for a quick preview run before committing to a large keyword pull.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is it legal to scrape BBC News? BBC's Terms of Use and robots.txt explicitly restrict automated scraping, systematic content extraction, and dataset creation from bbc.com, including for AI/LLM use. This Actor is provided as a technical tool; you are solely responsible for ensuring your use complies with BBC's Terms of Use and any applicable law in your jurisdiction before running it.

Known limitations: video/live pages return limited or no fullText since they are not primarily text articles. BBC's search backend only exposes a limited number of results per keyword regardless of maxResults.

No environment variables need to be configured to run or redeploy this Actor - it only performs public, unauthenticated HTTP requests.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console. For custom scraping solutions, reach out via the Apify Console contact options.