GOV.UK Publications Search

Search everything published on GOV.UK, the UK Government's official website: guidance, news and press releases, consultations, statistics and more. You get one clean row per document with its title, link, short description, type, dates and the government bodies behind it. No coding and no account with GOV.UK is needed: choose what you want and press Start.

Who it is for

• Journalists and researchers following what a department has announced or changed.
• Compliance, policy and public affairs teams who need to know when new guidance or a consultation appears on their topic.
• Anyone who wants a spreadsheet of recent government publications instead of clicking through search pages.

What you can set

Field	What it does
Words to search for	Words to look for, for example flood warning. Wrap words in double quotes to match the exact phrase, for example "flood warning". Optional.
Government organisation	One government body, written as its short web name, for example hm-revenue-customs. Optional.
Type of document	One kind of document, for example press_release. Optional.
From date / To date	Exact dates written YYYY-MM-DD. If you fill in "From date", "Days to look back" is ignored. Leaving "To date" empty means today.
Days to look back	How many days back from today to look, by the date each document was last updated. Default 7.
Order of results	newest (most recently updated first, the default) or relevance (best word matches first).
Maximum documents to return	The most rows you want back. Default 100, up to 10,000. It also caps what you pay.

If you leave "Words", "Organisation" and "Type" all empty, the date window must be 31 days or less, so a run cannot try to list the whole of GOV.UK. If you give any of the three, the window can be as long as you like.

What you get

One row per document, with these fields in this order: title, url, description, documentType, updatedAt (when GOV.UK last published or updated the page; always present), organisations (names), organisationSlugs (short web names), topicalEvents, worldLocations, isHistoric (true for documents from an earlier government), government (the government in power when it was published) and sourceUrl (the exact GOV.UK request that returned the row). Anything GOV.UK did not provide is null, and empty lists are []. Each document appears only once.

Sample row (from a real run on 4 November 2026, long address shortened):

{
  "title": "PM meeting with Prime Minister Mottley of Barbados: 2 November 2026",
  "url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-meeting-with-prime-minister-mottley-of-barbados-2-november-2026",
  "description": "The Prime Minister met the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua.",
  "documentType": "press_release",
  "updatedAt": "2026-11-03T07:47:43Z",
  "organisations": ["Prime Minister's Office, 10 Downing Street"],
  "organisationSlugs": ["prime-ministers-office-10-downing-street"],
  "topicalEvents": [],
  "worldLocations": ["antigua-and-barbuda"],
  "isHistoric": false,
  "government": "2026 Burnham Labour government",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?count=100&order=-public_timestamp&fields=...&start=0"
}

Pricing

You pay US$0.002 per document returned, and nothing when there are no matches.

Limits and tips

• Finding an organisation's short name: open the organisation's page on GOV.UK. The short name is the last part of the address. For https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs it is hm-revenue-customs.
• Common document types: guidance, press_release, news_story, consultation, statistics, policy_paper, research, transparency.
• Word searches match any of your words by default, so flood warning also finds documents that only mention "warning" (about 36,800 matches on one test). Wrapping the words in double quotes, "flood warning", narrows that to the exact phrase (about 860 matches on the same test). Choosing "relevance" order puts the best matches first.
• Dates: the date window and the order both use updatedAt, the date a document was last published or updated. World locations come back as short web names such as antigua-and-barbuda.
• Speed: the actor reads 100 documents per request with a short pause between requests, so 10,000 rows takes a few minutes. If GOV.UK is busy it waits and retries a few times before stopping with a clear message.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Data comes from the GOV.UK Search API; this actor is not affiliated with the UK Government or GOV.UK.