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Google News API: Search News Articles as JSON

14 Oct 2026Perceptlayer7 min read

To search Google News as JSON, send a GET request to /v1/google-news/news with a search term in q. Each result comes back with a title, link, snippet, source name and an ISO 8601 publish date. A successful call costs 1 credit, a failed one costs nothing, and the free tier covers 1,000 calls a month.

Is there an official Google News API?

Google's News help pages are written for publishers, and we found no keyword search API among them. What Google documents is a publisher-side tool: Publisher Center, where news publishers manage how their own content appears. That's the opposite direction from what a developer wants, which is a query in and articles out.

Publisher Center feeds don't fill the gap either. In an announcement dated March 2025, Google said it was moving to automatically generated publication pages and that "Google News will no longer use RSS feeds or web locations that were submitted in Publisher Center" (Google News Publisher Center announcement, 2025). Those feeds were about publishers submitting content, never about searching it. Nothing in that announcement describes a search feed you could build on.

So the practical options are scraping the results page yourself, paying each publisher's own API, or calling an endpoint that already returns the results as JSON. If you only need one publisher's articles, that publisher's own feed or API is simpler and you should use it. If you need a cross-publisher search, the Google News API here gives you one request and a stable shape. For the maintenance side of the scraping option, see what maintaining a scraper really involves.

How do you search Google News with one request?

Send a GET request to https://api.perceptlayer.com/v1/google-news/news with your key in the X-API-Key header and a query in q. The response is JSON with a news_results array, each item numbered by position. The whole call is one HTTP request and costs 1 credit when it succeeds.

curl "https://api.perceptlayer.com/v1/google-news/news?q=technology" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $API_KEY"

Replace $API_KEY with a key from a free sign-up. Where headers aren't possible, the key also works as the api_key query parameter. The authentication docs cover both, and the Requests section explains the general call format.

You can also run the same call without writing code. The News endpoint page links to the playground, where you pick the endpoint, fill in the parameters and run it with your key.

What does the response look like?

Each item in news_results describes one article. Below is an excerpt from a recorded response to the request above, trimmed with …: position 1 is omitted, and the thumbnail fields, the source icon and the publication link are cut. It shows the fields you'll use most: the headline, the link, the publish time in three forms, and the source.

{
  "news_results": [
    …
    {
      "position": 2,
      "title": "How did AI discover the internet's massive cyber-security risk?",
      "link": "https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cq0ld7e0jg2eo",
      "type": "article",
      "snippet": "The BBC's technology correspondent Joe Tidy explains how it happened, and what it means for you.",
      "iso_date": "2026-10-22T12:17:44+00:00",
      "published_at": "2026-10-22 12:17:44 UTC",
      "date": "today",
      …
      "source": {
        "name": "BBC",
        …
        "title": "BBC"
      },
      "story_token": "CBMiWEFVX3lxTFBkQ0VLSmdYNkk0TzVBZGtlU3piaFlGejFNemlncTZRTWR2MjFlNDhpWWNiVnJMYk5PRUo3eHJ2YlppUmtoLW5FbERMTFNBZ2xkMVhzNmpFWXU",
      "related_publications": [
        {
          "title": "BBC",
          …
          "publication_token": "CAAqIAgKIhpDQklTRFFnTWFna0tCMkppWXk1amIyMG9BQVAB"
        }
      ]
    },
    …
  ],
  "menu_links": [
    …
  ]
}

The table below lists what each field is for. These are the fields shown in the excerpt; the full items also carry thumbnail URLs, a source icon and a publication link.

Store iso_date, not date. The relative label changes depending on when you call, while iso_date is the same tomorrow as today.

Which parameters does the News endpoint take?

The endpoint has no required parameters and eleven optional ones. q is the free-text search, up to 500 characters. The four *_token parameters and kgmid are strings; token values appear in responses, and the playground shows what each one does.

gl and hl are two-character values, which is the shape of country and language codes. The endpoint documentation doesn't spell out defaults, page sizes or what each value of so does, so test them in the playground before you build on them. Our guide to paginating a web data API in Python covers the loop pattern for start and page style parameters.

How do you use the tokens in a response?

Responses include story_token and related_publications[].publication_token, and the endpoint accepts parameters of the same names. Copy a token from a result into the matching parameter in the playground to try it; we haven't recorded those calls, so we don't describe what they return. A successful call costs 1 credit like any other.

How much does a daily news monitor cost?

A news monitor costs 1 credit per query per run. Multiply queries by runs per day by days: 20 queries checked twice a day for 30 days is 20 × 2 × 30 = 1,200 credits. The Starter pack's 10,000 credits would cover that for more than eight months (10,000 ÷ 1,200 ≈ 8.3), and pricing shows what credits cost.

Packs: Starter is 10,000 credits, Build 50,000, Growth 200,000, Pro 500,000, Scale 1,000,000 and Volume 5,000,000. Purchased credits last 12 months, and there's no subscription. See pricing for what each pack costs and its request rate, and the credits docs.

A monitor that asks the same query often can skip repeat calls; caching API responses in Python shows how TTLs save credits.

Failed calls cost nothing. Every successful response carries X-Credits-Used and X-Credits-Remaining, so a monitor can log its own balance. The service is prepaid, so when credits run out calls return insufficient_credits (402) and nothing more is debited.

How do you run it on a schedule?

Run the query list from a cron job or scheduled function, keep the link of every article you've seen and store only new ones. The script below does that with the fields from the recorded response: news_results, title, link, iso_date and source.name.

import os
import requests

API = "https://api.perceptlayer.com/v1/google-news/news"
HEADERS = {"X-API-Key": os.environ["API_KEY"]}
QUERIES = ["technology", "cybersecurity"]

seen = set()  # load from your database in a real job

for q in QUERIES:
    r = requests.get(API, params={"q": q}, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    if r.status_code != 200:
        print(q, r.status_code, r.json()["error"]["code"])
        continue
    for item in r.json()["news_results"]:
        if item["link"] in seen:
            continue
        seen.add(item["link"])
        print(item["iso_date"], item["source"]["name"], item["title"])
    print("credits left:", r.headers["X-Credits-Remaining"])

Two points about errors. A 429 or 503 response carries a Retry-After header with the seconds to wait, and the rate limit docs cover the details. Requests have no idempotency key, so a call that timed out on your side may have succeeded and been billed; the article on retrying without paying twice shows how to handle that. The error reference lists every code.

If an agent rather than a cron job needs the news, the same endpoint is available through the MCP server at https://api.perceptlayer.com/mcp. Its call_endpoint tool takes the endpoint ID and the same parameters; see the MCP docs and giving a Claude agent live search results. The sibling guide for web results is Google Search API: Get Search Results as JSON.

Next step: get a free API key, then run the first cURL call above for q=technology and look at iso_date and source.name in your own response. Data is collected from publicly available sources and returned as found at the time of the call.

google newsnews apinews monitoringsearchjson