GDELT Worldwide News Scraper

GDELT Worldwide News Scraper

Search worldwide news through the GDELT 2.0 DOC API — a public, no-key, no-login JSON endpoint that indexes online news from across the planet in 65+ languages. No proxy or anti-bot handling needed.

> Pacing. GDELT's free DOC API asks for one request every 5 seconds per IP and answers > 429 with that message when you go faster. The actor paces its own requests to that limit > and backs off in multiples of it, so a throttled run recovers instead of returning nothing. > GDELT itself often takes 10-15s per response, so a run can legitimately take a minute.

What it does

Given a search query, the actor calls the GDELT DOC API in ArtList mode and returns clean, structured articles. You can filter by recency, source country, and source language, and sort by newest, oldest, or relevance.

Pricing

$2.00 per 1,000 articles ($0.002 each), with no run-start fee. Flat rate — no volume tiers, no plan gates — and you are charged only for articles actually returned.

There is exactly one charge event on this actor and nothing else on the bill: no per-query fee, no proxy surcharge (none is needed — GDELT is a public no-key API), and no monthly minimum. Diagnostic rows, blocked queries and no-result runs are free, so a query GDELT rejects costs $0.00.

Input

Output

Each successful row:

{
  "ok": true,
  "title": "…",
  "url": "https://…",
  "domain": "example.com",
  "sourceCountry": "United States",
  "language": "English",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-11T12:00:00.000Z",
  "socialImage": "https://…"
}

Results are de-duplicated by URL. Each ok:true article is billed one article charge unit. Diagnostic rows (ok:false) and empty/blocked runs are never charged.

Nullable fields: GDELT does not always populate every field. Any of title, url, domain, sourceCountry, language, publishedAt, and socialImage can be null for a given article (e.g. socialImage is often missing, and publishedAt is null when GDELT's seendate is unparseable). Rows with neither a url nor a title are dropped before charging.

Diagnostics

The actor never fails silently. Instead it writes a single diagnostic row (ok:false) with an errorCode and never charges for it:

• BAD_INPUT — GDELT rejected the query (e.g. "query too short"). Quote phrases and avoid overly short/common terms.
• NO_RESULTS — the query was valid but matched nothing. Broaden it or widen the timespan.
• RATE_LIMITED / SERVER_ERROR / NETWORK — transient issues; the actor retried with backoff first.

Notes / quirks

• GDELT requires the query to be URL-encoded and phrases to be quoted — the actor handles both.
• On a malformed query GDELT may return a text/plain error string (sometimes with HTTP 200) or an empty body instead of JSON. The actor guards JSON.parse and surfaces a clear BAD_INPUT diagnostic.
• GDELT's index covers roughly the last 3 months of news.
• The actor rotates a real browser User-Agent per request attempt for retry resilience, and supports an optional proxy (proxyConfiguration). Neither is required — GDELT is a public no-key API with no anti-bot — so leave the proxy unset unless you hit IP-level rate limits.