Free Google News API (2026): What's Free, What's Near-Free

Search for “free Google News API” and most pages promise a key that does not exist. Google closed its own news API years ago. What is left is a free RSS route, a crowd of third-party “news APIs” with small free plans, and paid APIs that return Google News results.

So here is the honest version. We read the official pricing and terms pages on 23 October 2026, worked out what each option costs at 1,000 to 1 million calls a month, and marked where “free” stops. If you came for a “free news API” in general, the free-plan comparison is below too.

The options at a glance

Two kinds of product hide behind the words “news API”. A news index holds its own pile of articles and lets you search it. A Google News results API returns what Google News shows for a query, in Google’s order. This table covers both. Everything was read on 23 October 2026.

Checked 2026-10-23. Sources are linked in each section below.

Is there an official Google News API?

No. Google had one, and it ended. In 2011 Google announced it was deprecating the Google News Search API, and on its developer blog in January 2016 it said the API would “cease operations on February 15, 2016”. It suggested the Custom Search API instead.

That suggestion no longer helps. Google’s Custom Search JSON API page says it gives 100 free queries a day and then $5 per 1,000, but it is “closed to new customers”, and existing customers have until 1 January 2027 to move. It searches a search engine you configure, not Google News.

Google does run a Publisher Center. It is a tool for news publishers to get their own content into Google News, including by submitting a feed. It does not let you read Google News results.

We found no other official route. “We found none” is not proof that a private programme does not exist, but nothing public offers a key.

The same thing happened to Bing. Microsoft’s lifecycle notice says the Bing Search APIs were retired on 11 August 2025, with no new signups. So the two big engines now have no general-purpose public search API of their own.

The free Google News RSS route

The one genuinely free route is Google News’s search feed at news.google.com/rss/search. You send a query, you get an RSS file back, and you need no key.

Google does not document this feed, so treat it as an unofficial route. Here is what that means in practice:

• It is XML, not JSON. You parse RSS yourself.
• You do the clean-up. A feed built for readers is not a data schema, so expect to handle links, dates and summaries in your own code.
• No published terms or limits. We found no Google page that documents this search feed, its terms or a rate limit. We cannot give you a safe request rate.

For a hobby script that polls a few queries, it is a fair choice. Our free Google News walkthrough covers it with Python. Check Google’s terms and your own counsel before you build a product on it.

Free news APIs: what each free plan allows

If you searched for a plain “free news API”, you are comparing news indexes. They all have a free plan. They all fence it in. Read the fence first, because it decides whether the plan is usable at all.

Checked 2026-10-23 on each vendor’s own pricing or access page.

NewsAPI.org

• Price: Business is $449 a month for 250,000 requests, then $0.0018 per extra request. Advanced is $1,749 a month for 2,000,000 requests, then $0.0009, with a 99.95% uptime SLA. Enterprise is “contact us”.
• Free tier: the Developer plan, with the limits in the table. Paid plans give real-time articles and up to 5 years of history.
• Watch-outs: the free plan’s terms rule out production use. It is a trial, not a free API for a product. The jump from $0 to $449 is the steepest on this page.
• Best for: teams that need a wide multi-source index with long history and can pay for it.

GNews

• Price: €49.99, €99.99 and €249.99 a month for 1,000, 5,000 and 25,000 requests a day. Yearly billing is lower: €39.99, €79.99 and €199.99 a month. Paid plans are real-time, with history from 2020 and full article content.
• Free tier: the free plan above, plus a 10-day free trial on every paid plan.
• Watch-outs: the free plan is non-commercial. Once you hit the daily cap, the FAQ says you get a 403 until 00:00 UTC.
• Where it beats us: it returns full article content on paid plans. Serpent’s News rows carry a headline, link, source, date, summary and image, and no article body.

NewsData.io

• Price: $199.99 a month for 20,000 credits, $349.99 for 50,000 and $1,299.99 for 1,000,000. Paid credits return 1 to 50 articles each; history runs from 6 months to 10 years by plan.
• Watch-outs: the page says unused credits are not carried over. It does not state commercial-use terms or rate limits, so read its terms before you rely on the free plan.

Currents

• Price: $69, $150 and $300 a month for 75,000, 300,000 and 600,000 requests, enforced per day (2,500, 10,000 and 20,000). Annual billing lists lower figures.
• Watch-outs: customer-facing AI summaries, long-term caching, archives and republication are “not included by default”. At the cap you get HTTP 429 and no overage billing.
• Best for: internal dashboards and link-out apps.

TheNewsAPI

• Price: $19, $49 and $79 a month for 2,500, 10,000 and 25,000 requests a day, returning 25, 50 and 100 articles per request. Annual billing is $16, $41 and $66.
• Watch-outs: the pricing page states neither article delay nor commercial-use terms. The free plan returns 3 articles per request.
• Where it beats us: at full use its top plan works out cheaper per request than Serpent’s Default rate (see the cost section).

Mediastack

• Price: $24.99, $99.99 and $249.99 a month for 10,000, 50,000 and 250,000 calls. Free is 100 calls a month and non-commercial.
• Best for: small commercial projects that fit under 10,000 calls a month.

Guardian Open Platform

• Free tier: a developer key for non-commercial use: 1 call a second, 500 a day, article text, over 1.9 million pieces of content.
• Watch-outs: it is one publisher, not a news search across outlets. Commercial use needs a commercial key at a usage-based price.
• Best for: research, hackathons and anything that only needs Guardian journalism.

We did not list the New York Times API. Its developer site would not load for us, so we could not read its limits and terms.

What free really costs you

Free is a fine price for a weekend project. For anything a customer relies on, it hides five costs.

1. Delay. The free plans we read delay articles by 12 or 24 hours. For breaking news, brand alerts or a crisis monitor, a 12-hour-old story is a missed story.
2. Terms. Most free plans are for development, testing or non-commercial use. NewsAPI.org says its free plan cannot be used in production, “including internally”. If you ship on it, you are outside the plan.
3. Tiny quotas. 100 requests a day is about 3,000 a month. Tracking 50 brands every hour is 1,200 requests a day, already twelve times that.
4. Maintenance. An unofficial feed has no promise behind it. If Google changes the RSS format or link style, your parser breaks first and you find out second.
5. No one to ask. NewsAPI.org’s own free plan lists “no uptime SLA” and basic support.

Here is a worked example, as arithmetic and not a measurement. Say you need 10,000 news searches a month for a client report. The cheapest paid plan we read that covers it is TheNewsAPI at $19 a month, then Mediastack at $24.99 and GNews at €49.99. On Serpent at the Default rate it is 10,000 × $0.0002 = $2.00. Even a few hours of your time spent on a free route costs more than that.

Near-free Google News APIs, one by one

“Near-free” here means pay-as-you-go prices of cents or dollars per 1,000 calls, or a small monthly plan, for an API that returns Google News results. Each option gets the same checklist: price, free tier, limits, best for, watch-outs.

Serpent

• Price: $0.20 per 1,000 News calls at the Default tier, with no monthly plan. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.02 per 1,000 (Growth) and $500 to $0.01 (Scale). The deposit is spendable balance, not a fee. The minimum first deposit is $10. The News price is the same on all five engines.
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services, plus one free demo run a day on the News Search API page.
• What you get: engine=google is the default, and yahoo, bing, ddg and brave use the same endpoint and the same fields. Every row has position, title, url, source, publishedTime (a YYYY-MM-DD date or null), snippet and image; Google rows add google_news_url. There are 112 country codes, a language filter, and freshness from the last hour to the last year.
• Billing: pay as you go. Deposited credits do not expire; promotional bonus credits expire after 30 days (see pricing). On engine=google a call is one charge whatever num you send. On the other engines, a multi-page request is one charge on Growth and Scale and on Default accounts holding at least $10; below $10, Default accounts pay one unit per page requested.
• Watch-outs: no article body, and many Google rows have no summary. num goes up to 50 but is a ceiling, not a promise, and a short answer says so in a delivery block. Coverage and order can vary by region and time. Default accounts allow 100 calls a minute and 10,000 a day. The free allowance is small.
• Best for: monitoring brands and topics in Google News order, at a per-call price you can forecast.

SerpApi

• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million. The page prints plan prices, not a per-1,000 rate.
• Free tier: 250 searches a month, limited to 50 an hour.
• What it returns: a dedicated Google News API with position, title, source, link, thumbnail, date and iso_date, plus related topics and publications, and topic, publication and story tokens.
• Where it beats us: cached, errored and failed searches do not count against your monthly total, and its Google News page documents an ISO date field plus topic, publication and story tokens that our News endpoint does not have.
• Best for: teams that want one well-known vendor and a fixed monthly bill.

SearchApi

• Price: $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000), $250 for 100,000, $1,500 for 1 million and $1 per 1,000 at 5 million for $5,000.
• Free tier: 100 free requests, no card. The page does not say whether that is one-off or monthly.
• Watch-outs: its pricing page lists a Google News API, but the dedicated page we tried returned 404, so we could not read its fields.
• Best for: teams that already use it for other engines.

DataForSEO

• Price: its Google SERP API “starts at $0.0006” per SERP page on the standard queue, $0.0012 priority and $0.002 live. News is listed as one of the SERP types. We did not find a News-specific row, so treat $0.60 per 1,000 as the general SERP rate, not a confirmed News price.
• Free tier: the page offers a free account with a playground; it states no free credits.
• Best for: developers who are comfortable with a task-and-poll queue to get the lowest tier.

We left out Serper and Bright Data. Serper’s page advertises 2,500 free queries, but we could not read its News price. Bright Data’s SERP page does not name Google News.

What it costs at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M calls

Per-1,000 prices are how vendors like to be compared. A monthly bill is what you pay. This table shows one month of news searches on the cheapest published plan that covers the volume and allows commercial use where we could tell. These are our sums on published prices, not a vendor offer.

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Growth needs a one-time $100 deposit and Scale $500; the deposit is spendable balance. Plans quoted per day are converted at an even spread over a 30-day month. Vendors that sell by the request count one request, not one article.

How each column was built: Serpent is calls multiplied by the published News rate. NewsAPI.org’s Business plan covers 250,000 requests, so $449 holds for the first three rows; at 1 million, Advanced ($1,749 for 2,000,000) beats Business plus overage. GNews counts per day: 10,000 a month is about 333 a day, which fits Essential’s 1,000; 100,000 is about 3,333 a day, which needs Business’s 5,000; 1 million is about 33,333 a day, above Enterprise’s 25,000. TheNewsAPI and Currents follow the same logic. NewsData.io’s 100,000 row needs Corporate because Professional has 50,000 credits. SerpApi and SearchApi are the cheapest plan that fits. At 1 million, Mediastack’s largest published plan is 250,000 calls a month.

One Serpent limit to plan around: a Default account allows 10,000 calls a day, so a steady 1 million a month (about 33,000 a day) needs the higher allowance that comes after $500 of total deposits, which is also the Scale rate.

Here is the price claim, with its limits. At Default, Serpent’s $0.20 per 1,000 is among the lowest published rates we found. It is not the lowest: TheNewsAPI’s Pro plan, $79 for 25,000 requests a day, works out to about $0.11 per 1,000 if you use every request for 30 days. After a one-time $100 deposit, $0.02 per 1,000 is below the lowest rate we worked out for any rival we checked, including that one. The next lowest we worked out are GNews Enterprise at about €0.33 and Currents at about $0.50, both at full use, and DataForSEO’s general SERP rate of $0.60. Enterprise and custom plans publish no price, so we left them out. Credit-bucket plans only reach their printed rate at full use, which we cover in our look at credit expiry.

How to choose

• A hobby script or a notebook. Google News RSS, with the caveats above. Or any free plan above for a private project.
• A student or research project. The Guardian’s free developer key, if one publisher is enough.
• A few hundred searches a month, budget zero, non-commercial. GNews, Currents or TheNewsAPI free plans. Read each fence first.
• A product, client report or alert feed. A paid, documented API with a price per call you can forecast. This is where Serpent is the pick on the numbers above, if Google News order and headlines are what you need.
• You need full article text or years of archive. A news index such as GNews, NewsData.io or NewsAPI.org. We return headlines and links, not article bodies.
• Heavily repeated queries and a fixed bill. SerpApi, because cached searches are free.
• You track more than news. Our free-API series covers Google web search, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Brave.

Quick start: Google News results in one request

Send your key in the X-API-Key header. This call asks for Google News results about a brand from the last hour:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/news?q=acme+corp&engine=google&country=us&freshness=h" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

In Python, the last 24 hours of coverage, 20 articles at most:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/news",
    params={"q": "acme corp", "engine": "google", "country": "us",
            "freshness": "d", "num": 20},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
if not data.get("success"):
    raise SystemExit(data.get("message"))

for article in data["results"]["articles"]:
    print(article["publishedTime"], article["source"], article["title"], article["url"])

A response looks like this, shortened. Every key is always present, and a value the article did not carry is null.

{
  "success": true,
  "query": "acme corp",
  "type": "news",
  "engine": "google",
  "country": "us",
  "results": {
    "articles": [
      {
        "position": 1,
        "title": "Acme Corp names new chief financial officer",
        "url": "https://example.com/acme-cfo",
        "google_news_url": "https://news.example.com/articles/...",
        "source": "Reuters",
        "publishedTime": "2026-09-07",
        "snippet": "The appointment follows a quarter in which...",
        "image": null
      }
    ]
  }
}

Send format=simple to trim each article to position, title, URL and source (Google rows keep google_news_url). The full parameter list is in the API docs, and you can run the same call in the playground first.

Moving over from another news API

• Your query goes in q, the region in country and the language in language. Recency is the freshness parameter rather than a date range.
• publishedTime is a date, not a timestamp. If you need the posting minute, keep your own first-seen time; our freshness check explains how.
• Repeated links are your job to remove. Our deduplication guide shows how.
• Cache repeated queries so you do not pay twice for one answer. For a wider view of the market, see best Google News APIs for media monitoring and news API for developers.

Limits and what we could not verify

• We found no official Google News API. That means we found none. We cannot prove a private programme does not exist.
• The RSS route is described, not tested. We did not run it, we did not test its limits or stability, and we found no Google documentation for it.
• Some terms were not on the pages we read. NewsData.io and TheNewsAPI do not state commercial-use terms on their pricing pages. We read nothing about the New York Times API, Serper’s News price, Bright Data’s Google News support or DataForSEO’s News-specific rate.
• Units differ. A “request”, a “credit” and a “search” are not the same size across vendors. We compared the vendor’s own unit, not articles returned.
• History and body text. We cover freshness filters up to a year; several rivals sell years of history and full article text, which we do not.
• No benchmarks. We make no claim about speed, coverage or result quality for any service, including ours.
• Prices move. Every figure comes from a vendor page read on 2026-10-23; check again before you commit.

FAQ

Is there a free Google News API?

Not an official one. Google shut its Google News Search API down on 15 February 2016. The free routes today are Google's unofficial RSS search feed, which returns XML and has no published terms we could find, and the free plans of other news APIs, which are mostly non-commercial and delayed 12 to 24 hours. For production use, a pay-as-you-go API is the practical answer.

Does Google have an official news API?

We found none. Google deprecated the Google News Search API in 2011 and turned it down in February 2016, and it now offers Publisher Center, a tool for publishers to submit their own content. Its suggested replacement, the Custom Search JSON API, is closed to new customers. We cannot prove a private programme does not exist.

Is Google News RSS free to use?

The feed needs no key and costs nothing to use. But we found no Google page documenting the search feed, its terms or a rate limit, and it returns XML you must parse yourself. Check Google's terms and your own counsel before building a product on it.

Is NewsAPI.org free for commercial use?

No. Its Developer plan is free, with 100 requests a day and a 24-hour delay, but the pricing page says it is for development and testing in a development environment only and cannot be used in staging or production, including internally. Production use needs the Business plan at $449 a month for 250,000 requests.

What is the best free news API?

It depends on what free has to do. For a non-commercial project, GNews, Currents and TheNewsAPI each have a free plan, and the Guardian's developer key covers one publisher. For a product that needs commercial rights and fresh articles, every free plan we read falls short, and a low-cost pay-as-you-go API is the better fit.

What is the cheapest Google News API?

On rates published on 2026-10-23, Serpent charges $0.20 per 1,000 News calls with no plan, $0.02 after a one-time $100 deposit and $0.01 after $500. The lowest rival rate we worked out was TheNewsAPI's Pro plan at about $0.11 per 1,000, only if its 25,000 daily requests are used every day. Custom plans publish no price, so they are not counted.

Sources

• Google Developers Blog: Retirement of certain Google search APIs
• Google Custom Search JSON API overview
• Google News Publisher Center Help and Feed sections
• Microsoft: Bing Search APIs retirement
• NewsAPI.org pricing
• GNews pricing
• NewsData.io pricing
• Currents API pricing
• TheNewsAPI pricing
• Mediastack plans
• Guardian Open Platform access levels
• SerpApi pricing and SerpApi Google News API
• SearchApi pricing
• DataForSEO SERP API pricing