GDELT Worldwide News Scraper

GDELT News Scraper: search world news in 65+ languages, no API key

Give it a query and you get news articles from most of the planet back as rows: headline, link, outlet domain, the country the outlet is in, the language it was written in, the publish time and the share image. Filter by country, by language, or to the last day, week or month.

Two limits come from GDELT itself and neither can be worked around here. Any one query returns at most 250 articles with no way to page past that, and the index only reaches back about three months. This is a tool for what is being published now, not an archive.

🌍 What GDELT News Scraper does

It searches GDELT's worldwide news index and hands back flat rows. GDELT watches online news in more than 65 languages, which is the reason to use it: a brand or a policy that has three mentions in English news might have forty in Spanish, Indonesian and Albanian, and this finds those.

Your query goes to GDELT as written, so quoted phrases work, OR works, and operators like domain:reuters.com work. The country and language boxes are added to the query for you.

Articles that come back twice under the same URL are dropped, and so is anything arriving with neither a link nor a headline, before either reaches your dataset.

GDELT asks callers to leave about five seconds between requests, and it can take ten to fifteen seconds to answer a wide query. The run paces itself accordingly. A run that takes a minute is normal here, not stuck.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "\"electric vehicles\"",
  "timespan": "3d",
  "sourceCountry": "DE",
  "sort": "DateDesc",
  "maxItems": 250
}

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run, one of the Albanian results for a China supply-chain query:

{
  "ok": true,
  "title": "FOKUS – Kina u bën thirrje BRICS - it dhe vendeve partnere ti mbajnë zinxhirët e furnizimit  të qëndrueshëm dhe të papenguar  – 24 ore",
  "url": "https://24-ore.com/fokus-kina-u-ben-thirrje-brics-it-dhe-vendeve-partnere-ti-mbajne-zinxhiret-e-furnizimit-te-qendrueshem-dhe-te-papenguar/",
  "domain": "24-ore.com",
  "sourceCountry": "Albania",
  "language": "Albanian",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-13T09:15:00.000Z",
  "socialImage": null
}

🧾 Reading the output

Articles carry ok: true. When a query is refused or something goes wrong you get a single row with ok: false and an errorCode instead of an empty dataset, and that row is not charged.

Worth knowing: the run still finishes green when it ends on one of those rows, and the Console's overview table has no column for ok or errorCode, so a refused query looks like one blank line there. Check ok in the JSON, or switch the view to all fields, before deciding a run failed.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open GDELT News Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put your keywords in Search query. Quote anything that is a phrase. 3. Set Timespan to something like 3d if you only want recent coverage. 4. Set Max articles, then click Start. Give it up to a minute. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$2.00 per 1,000 articles. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per article row delivered. Duplicates dropped inside the run, rows GDELT never returned, and diagnostic rows are not charged, so a query that GDELT refuses or that matches nothing costs you nothing.

💡 What people use it for

• Following a story outside your own language. Same query, sourceLang left empty, and the spread

of countries in the results is the story.

• Watching a brand or a person across regions, on a schedule, with timespan set to 1d.
• Building a source list for a topic by counting domain across a few hundred rows.
• Comparing how much coverage two countries give the same event, by running the query twice with

different sourceCountry values.

• Feeding headlines into a summariser or a Notion database and reading the digest instead of the

feed.

🚧 What it does not do

• Headlines and metadata only. No article body. Follow url yourself if you need the text.
• 250 articles per query, and no paging past it. To go wider, split the job by country, by

language, or into narrower time windows and stitch the results.

• About three months of history. Older news is not in the index to find.
• No tone, sentiment or event scores. This reads GDELT's article search, not its other datasets.
• Very short or very common single-word queries get refused by GDELT, not by this actor.
• Deduplication is per run. Two scheduled runs over overlapping windows can both return the same

article, so dedupe on url your side.

• Coverage is GDELT's. If an outlet is not in its index, no query here will find it.
• socialImage is missing more often than it is present, and publishedAt is when GDELT saw

the article, which can be a little after the outlet published it.

🧭 Which news scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a GDELT API key? No. Nothing to apply for, no quota to manage.

Why did I only get 250 articles? That is GDELT's cap on a single query and there is no way past it. Narrow the query and run it more than once.

Why was my query refused? Single words that are very short or very common get rejected by GDELT itself. Quote a phrase or add a second word, and the BAD_INPUT row carries GDELT's own wording.

Can I get the full text of the articles? Not from here. You get the link, and the article is on the outlet's site.

How far back does it go? Roughly three months.

Why did my run take a minute? GDELT wants a few seconds between requests and often takes ten to fifteen seconds to answer. The run waits rather than hammering it.

Is this legal? These are public news headlines and links from a public index. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the query and the run ID. The errorCode on the diagnostic row, and GDELT's own message beside it, usually name the problem.