2026-11-11, News · Google · Fundamentals

Best Google News APIs compared on price and fields

Google retired its own Google News Search API: it was deprecated in 2011 and ceased operations on February 15, 2016 (Google Developers Blog, checked 2026-11-11). What is left are third-party services that read Google News for you, Google’s undocumented RSS feeds, and news APIs that search their own index instead. This post compares them for one job: getting the articles Google News shows for a query, in a given country and language, as data.

Vendor facts come from each vendor’s own pricing or documentation page, linked and checked on 2026-11-11.

First check which list a service reads

“Google News” names two different result lists:

• news.google.com, the Google News site and app, organized by country edition (US:en, DE:de).
• The News tab of a Google Search results page, the tbm=nws vertical. It takes Google Search targeting such as a city or a device.

Their articles and order differ. SerpApi sells them as two engines: engine=google_news for news.google.com and the Google News Results API, which “scrapes results from the ‘News’ tab of a normal Google Search results page”. SearchApi’s google_news engine shows a tbm=nws Google Search URL as its example request, and its separate google_news_portal engine shows news.google.com URLs. Pick the list your readers actually use, and keep it fixed across a time series.

Comparison

None of the result APIs returns the article body. For text, pair one with a news index (see below).

The options

SerpApi

engine=google_news takes q, gl, hl and tokens for a topic, publication, section or story. The page documents no device or pagination parameter. Plans (pricing): Free 250 searches a month, Starter $25 for 1,000, Developer $75 for 5,000, Production $150 for 15,000, Big Data $275 for 30,000, Searcher $725 for 100,000. Each plan also caps searches per hour (200 on Starter). Failed searches are not counted. The U.S. Legal Shield starts with Production.

The same plans buy the News tab engine (tbm=nws), which adds a snippet and a published_at timestamp.

Fits teams already on SerpApi for Google Search, at low monthly volumes.

SearchApi

google_news takes Google Search targeting: location or uule, gl, hl, device (desktop, mobile, tablet), time_period (last_hour to last_year) or a custom date range, sort_by=most_recent and page. google_news_portal reads news.google.com by ceid and returns story and section data.

Plans (pricing): Developer $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000 over), Production $100 for 35,000, BigData $250 for 100,000. Every plan can use at most 20% of its credits in any hour. Signup gives 100 free requests.

Fits News tab work that needs city or device targeting and date filters.

Apify actors

Apify’s store has many Google News actors from independent developers, each with its own inputs, fields and price. Two of the most used:

• lhotanova/google-news-scraper (3,612 users, rated 4.59): from $1.30 per 1,000 articles, plus a start fee per run charged by memory. It takes Google News search syntax, a US:en style edition and a date range. Its page says Google News returns about 100 results per search, so above 90 it searches day by day. Output includes the publisher’s URL and the loaded article URL.
• data_xplorer/google-news-scraper-fast (2,673 users, rated 4.90): from $1.00 per 1,000 articles, no start fee listed. It takes keywords, a timeframe and a region_language, and returns a description per article.

Apify plans (pricing) start with a free plan with $5 of usage a month, then Starter at $19. Actors bill per article, not per search, so a query returning 100 articles costs 100 results. There is no position field in either output.

Fits one-off pulls and backfills by date, where volume is counted in articles.

Google News RSS

news.google.com/rss/search?q=…&hl=…&gl=…&ceid=… returns up to about 100 items per query, free and without a key. Google does not document the feeds, items have no position or snippet, links are Google redirects, and the copyright text in each feed limits use to personal, non-commercial feed readers. Google News RSS feeds covers the URL shapes, the when: operator and the terms.

Fits personal readers and prototypes.

AnswerLine Google News

POST /v1/monitor/google/news takes a query, a country (or gl) and an optional hl. It returns result.newsResults[] in the order Google News shows them, each with position, title, source (the publisher’s name), date as an ISO 8601 UTC timestamp, link (a news.google.com redirect) and page.

• Editions: 71 countries, listed in coverage. A country outside the list is refused with a 400. A country and language pair Google has no edition for fails and is not charged.
• Not served: article text, archive and device (a request that sets it gets a 400). state is accepted and answers for the whole US.
• include.html links a copy of what the results were read from, at no extra cost.
• Every article comes back on page 1, so leave pages at 1.

A request costs $0.001 at the Starter tier and $0.50–$1.00 per 1,000 across tiers, the same synchronous or as an async task (pricing). Failed requests are not charged. Batches of up to 500 tasks report to a signed webhook, and the same key runs Google Search and the AI engines.

Fits recurring monitoring of what Google News shows per edition: coverage share, the position of a negative story, adverse media checks. Request and response fields, date handling and storage are in how to get Google News results as JSON.

News index APIs are a different tool

NewsAPI.org and GNews search their own article index:

• NewsAPI.org: Business $449 a month for 250,000 requests, real-time, up to 5 years of history. The free Developer plan has a 24-hour delay and “cannot be used in a staging or production environment (including internally)”.
• GNews: Essential €49.99 a month for 1,000 requests a day, up to 25 articles per request, full content, real-time. The free plan cuts content to 250 characters with a 12-hour delay.

An index answers “what was written about X since Monday”. A Google News result answers “what does Google put in front of a reader in Germany for X right now, and in what order”. Screening and PR teams often need both. Best news APIs compares ten index APIs.

How to choose

1. List. news.google.com or the News tab. Run the same query on both in a browser and see which matches what your users see.
2. Unit of billing. Per search (SerpApi, SearchApi), per article (Apify) or per request from a balance (AnswerLine). Convert your plan to one unit before comparing.
3. Targeting. City, device and date filters exist only on the News tab engines. news.google.com is targeted by edition.
4. Position. If you report rank or prominence, rule out outputs without a position field.
5. Links. Redirect links need a resolve step before you can key on the publisher’s URL.
6. Terms. RSS is personal use only. Check each vendor’s terms for storing results.

Cost example

20 queries in 3 editions, checked every 2 hours for 30 days: 20 × 3 × 12 × 30 = 21,600 searches a month. List prices checked 2026-11-11, before tax.

Check hourly caps against your schedule, which sends 720 searches at once every 2 hours. SearchApi’s Production plan allows 7,000 an hour (20% of 35,000). For sizing a recurring program across engines, see AI monitoring cost planning.

Try it

A new account gets 100 free requests. Run your own queries in two or three editions and compare the lists with the options above. Failed requests are not charged, and tiers are on /pricing. Field reference: Google News engine page.

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