How widely a story is being covered, not just that it was
The News Intelligence API returns news search and analysis as clean JSON.
11 active endpoints, on 0, 1 and 2 credit tiers.
- POST/news-intel/v1/search
- POST/news-intel/v1/timeline
- POST/news-intel/v1/sentiment
- POST/news-intel/v1/entities
- POST/news-intel/v1/trending
- POST/news-intel/v1/top_headlines
- POST/news-intel/v1/by_source
- +4 more
What News Intelligence endpoints does ReefAPI ship?
11 live read endpoints. Read-only data API: no writes, no account actions, no dashboard access on the target site.
News Intelligence API
3 of 11 endpoints, ready to run
News matching a query over a time window, deduplicated, with the source domain and publication time on every article and the duplicate count reported.
{ "ok": true, "meta": { "api": "news-intel", "endpoint": "search", "mode": "live", "latency_ms": 3494.7, "record_count": 98, "cache_hit": false }, "data": { "articles": [ { "title": "Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down", "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiqAFBVV95cUxNeTRIUDBYQWZnU3dTSGNmb012T2VvcDYxOHhleFhhZmY0NUZJaEhJMlZFRTIyZzQ2d1JrS0ZLd3F5LTkwVXQyaElOWVhxRTdPZVhsT1BlOUFWekNranBlRWRGM0t2YnFvMjI2ZnphV2pzUFNXeWFWcmZMN1hFTkJoekFqNGZiQzNmWWRtSnF4UkJ3VG1Vek05VlM2WW51OVJJeFVwZkU4VW7SAa4BQVVfeXFMTnZiS2ZVSnIxeHozVFRvb2NVVFFPSFhtWjcwczVVMWxjV1h0dktFbHZsSUZrSWlNQmRBaHFtaXNMWGFyMDZKYUhSZTdsNVBpaUdqaGxPb05TeGJSdmRmRTRFYktBRjRKVUc2dHZiZ2FqWXRfZWJlb3RibzdtaHk1SXdFLUQ5SkZlVElTbUlGZUIzNk5lUElhbDRud0RPZlBlZy13S1BHVkV5eVItWk9R?oc=5", "source_domain": "cnbc.com", "source_country": null, "published_at": "2026-08-26T00:34:00Z", "language": null, "snippet": null, "image": null, "source": "google_news", "tone": null, "publisher": "CNBC", "duplicate_count": 0, "also_reported_by": [] }, { "title": "TIME Reveals the 2026 TIME100 AI List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence", "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi1wFBVV95cUxOeUg5OE1hZExocUtuYVlkbmN0a2NrWmNQaW5GY0NQN0tRamFjWmx2UTBGeTRydGp5c3FHeVdRTlNaYi00clplLTZrZDlHamE3bXpBOWE4MldraHZrbVBMMjN1X1ZTLVR0YV9LVllMcldob1I5UDRzZzRPdWhpMTRGaDJrV3Z4eWFVWEJoZ3pQbTFneUFHa3ZEX1RTOUUyRG1hTHFubEVQVl85TEhRWGI2c0FFakl1VVNaV1o2c0JHaHQ1MDc4ZEZwazBMWUpqWms3MGZIdTJQZw?oc=5", "source_domain": "time.com", "source_country": null, "published_at": "2026-08-27T12:30:00Z", "language": null, "snippet": null, "image": null, "source": "google_news", "tone": null, "publisher": "Time Magazine", "duplicate_count": 0, "also_reported_by": [] }, { "title": "The Fed confronts a powerful new economic force", "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMitwFBVV95cUxPcTd5UUJ2NXhhSmlMMXQ4c2tPdk5TNW5nTURrdWVCaDV6SlJpWWt2LUNSeDJpT1Q3OEtjdU1xV2ZOZnRRemtZRElucXNDdXQ5bVVQNFNkOUZwOTBEMC1hS1NSTFotQW9XaTFpY0k5QUtETkZndUpscDQwbm1qR2lYMFJyOU1oVzdfUFVuV05NaFBqczdIbHlWVUd6dndaeFg4OGFKampkWDBzSTJsejEzVkJYY2NzaXM?oc=5", "source_domain": "washingtonpost.com", "source_country": null, "published_at": "2026-08-29T13:32:50Z", "language": null, "snippet": null, "image": null, "source": "google_news", "tone": null, "publisher": "The Washington Post", "duplicate_count": 0, "also_reported_by": [] } ], "query": "artificial intelligence", "timespan": "1w", "total_before_dedup": 100, "removed_duplicates": 2, "sources_used": [ "google_news" ], "freshness": { "google_news": "near-live (minutes)" } } }
How the News Intelligence API works
News Intelligence is a normal ReefAPI surface — the same four rules that hold for every other engine on the key.
No OAuth app, no request signing, no per-site account. One key covers all 184 engines.
Every route is a POST with a JSON body. Parameters are validated against the published schema before anything is charged.
Credits, not seats. Failed and blocked calls are never charged, and cache hits cost nothing.
One envelope everywhere. meta carries latency_ms, record_count and the endpoint that answered.
Telling a press release from a story
One outlet carrying a piece is a placement. Forty outlets carrying it within a day is an event. The difference is breadth, and it is not visible in a headline list.
{"query": "your company", "timespan": "1w"}Deduplicated across outlets, with the number of duplicates removed reported — syndication makes one story look like twenty otherwise.
{"query": "your company", "timespan": "1w"}Then the breadth measure: how many distinct outlets, and which.
The deduplication count is itself a signal — heavy syndication of an identical piece looks different from independent coverage, and the response separates them.
curl -X POST https://api.reefapi.com/news-intel/v1/search \
-H "x-api-key: $REEF_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"OpenAI","timespan":"2d","max":40}'{
"ok": true,
"data": { … },
"meta": {
"api": "news-intel",
"endpoint": "search",
"mode": "live",
"latency_ms": …,
"record_count": …
},
"error": null
}Which upstream answers which action, and what a busy window costs you
news-intel merges three very different sources into one article shape, and which one answered decides which fields are populated. GDELT allows roughly one request every five seconds and that window is shared, so it is routinely unavailable. Actions that can fall back to Google News still return ok true with fewer fields, while actions that cannot fall back return an error instead of a short answer. meta.sources_used and meta.source_errors tell you which case you got.
| Action | Backed by | What you get, and what you lose |
|---|---|---|
| search, coverage, by_source, batch | Google News RSS plus GDELT, merged (merge_google_news defaults true) | on a busy GDELT window the call still succeeds on Google News alone, and language, snippet, image, source_country and tone all come back null |
| timeline, sentiment, entities | GDELT only | no fallback exists, so a busy window returns UPSTREAM_HTTP with a retry-in-a-few-seconds message rather than an empty series |
| top_headlines | Google News section feed | topic is a hard enum of WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, SCIENCE and HEALTH, and an unlisted value is rejected |
| tech | Hacker News top, new or best, or Algolia full-text search | the only action that returns the publisher's own URL, plus points, author, num_comments and hn_url |
| sources | a static directory, no upstream call | 19 US outlets, editions DE ES FR GB HK IN QA US, and 12 language codes; by_source itself accepts any publisher domain |
| trending | GDELT volume buckets | six default buckets: breaking news, world, tech, business, politics and science |
Google-News-backed articles carry a news.google.com/rss/articles/ redirect URL rather than the publisher's link, so source_domain and publisher are the reliable identity fields, and only tech returns direct publisher URLs. trending is GDELT-only but does not error when GDELT is busy: it returns ok true with volume 0 and an empty sample_headlines for every bucket, so check volume before you use it.
Which parts answer reliably, and which depend on a public research service
Measured across all the endpoints on 2026-08-30. The second row is the important one and it goes squarely against us.
Responses report how many articles were found before deduplication and how many duplicates were removed. Syndicated wire copy otherwise inflates every volume metric built on news, and here the inflation is visible rather than baked in.
Sentiment, timeline, entities and trending are built on a public research index that is heavily loaded. Measured on 2026-08-30, all four returned an upstream timeout while search, top headlines, by-source, coverage and the source list all answered normally. Probing that index directly, a successful response took twenty to twenty-six seconds against our per-attempt cap, so this is its latency rather than a block. Treat those four as best-effort analytics and build anything you depend on out of the search side, which is on a different source.
When the upstream does not answer, the response is an upstream-timeout error naming how many attempts were made and what is consequently unavailable. It does not return an empty sentiment distribution that reads as neutral, which would be the genuinely dangerous behaviour for a metric someone charts.
You can ask for everything from one publisher domain, and the source list endpoint returns the outlets, topics, languages and countries covered — with a note that any publisher domain is accepted, not only the listed ones.
As with any aggregator-sourced feed, the article URL is a redirect rather than the publisher's own link. Resolve it before storing if the canonical URL matters to you.
What people build with News Intelligence
The jobs this data is most often used for.
endpoints
credits per call
Brand-monitoring tools call search and sentiment to track coverage volume and tone.
Analysts use timeline and entities to map how a story developed and who was involved.
Dashboards use trending and top_headlines to surface what is breaking.
What News Intelligence data costs
The cheapest call here is 0 credits, so $15/mo (Pro) buys 10,000 of them — $1.50 per 1,000 credits. Credits roll over and never expire, and failed or blocked calls are not charged.
Full pricing →- 1,000 free credits on signup, no card
- One key, all 184 APIs, one credit pool
- Failed and blocked calls are never charged
- Credits roll over and never expire
Call it in two lines
Sign up, get 1,000 credits and one key that works on every engine. Then this is the whole protocol.
curl -X POST https://api.reefapi.com/news-intel/v1/search \
-H "x-api-key: $REEF_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"OpenAI","timespan":"2d","max":40}'import requests
r = requests.post(
"https://api.reefapi.com/news-intel/v1/search",
headers={"x-api-key": REEF_KEY},
json={
"query": "OpenAI",
"timespan": "2d",
"max": 40
},
)
print(r.json()["data"])Have a question? We got answers.
The questions people actually ask before wiring up News Intelligence.
Get a free key →Why are snippet, language, image and tone null on every article?▾
Those fields only exist on the GDELT side of the merge. A search for "OpenAI" over 2 days returned 94 articles with meta.sources_used ["google_news"] and meta.source_errors ["gdelt: throttled (5s window)"], and every snippet, language, tone and source_country in that response was null. The article count was unaffected, the metadata was not. Read meta.sources_used before you build anything on those fields.
Why is url a news.google.com address instead of the publisher's link?▾
Because Google News RSS publishes its own redirect URLs and the engine returns what the feed gave rather than guessing the destination. The publisher is still identified: source_domain read cnbc.com and techcrunch.com on measured results, and publisher carried the display name, for example "TechCrunch". If you need the real article link, the tech action returns direct URLs, or hand the story to news-article to fetch and extract it.
What does dedup actually merge, and how do I turn it off?▾
A measured search returned total_before_dedup 101, removed_duplicates 7 and 94 survivors. Clustering is exact URL first, then host plus path, then a stemmed token-set Jaccard comparison of titles at the similarity threshold, which defaults to 0.6 and accepts 0.3 to 1.0 where higher merges less. Survivors carry duplicate_count and also_reported_by. Set dedup false for the raw firehose.
How is this different from news-article?▾
news-intel is query in, metadata out: it never fetches an article body, so you get titles, URLs, domains and timestamps but no full text. news-article goes the other way, taking one URL and extracting the readable article from it. The normal pipeline is news-intel to discover the story and news-article to read the pages you picked.
How far back can I search?▾
GDELT indexes roughly the last three months, which is the real ceiling. timespan accepts 1h, 12h, 1d, 3d, 1w, 2w and 1m and defaults to 1d, and passing start or end overrides it entirely, accepting YYYYMMDD, YYYYMMDDHHMMSS or ISO 8601. The freshness block in the response labels the Google News side as near-live in minutes and GDELT as roughly 15 minutes, because of its update windows.
Which country codes should I pass?▾
search and its relatives take a GDELT FIPS code such as US, UK, FR, IN or BR, while on top_headlines country selects a Google News edition. The engine normalizes across the two: measured top_headlines calls with country GB and country UK returned identical results, led by bbc.co.uk, theguardian.com and independent.co.uk. The sources directory lists its editions in ISO2 form as DE, ES, FR, GB, HK, IN, QA and US.
Why does outlet_count say 2 when both entries are the same domain?▾
outlet_count is the size of the story cluster, not the number of distinct publishers. A measured "nvidia earnings" story returned outlet_count 2 with both outlets listed as finance.yahoo.com, because that outlet published two variants of the same story and both landed in the cluster. If you need distinct publishers, de-duplicate outlets on source_domain yourself before counting.
What are the ceilings on one call?▾
max controls how many articles are pulled per source before de-duplication, accepts 1 to 250 and is clamped at 250, which is GDELT's own limit. batch runs up to 10 queries under one shared call and preserves input order; a measured two-query batch returned 190 articles across the two result groups in about four seconds. Large sweeps work better as several batches than as one oversized max.
What is the News Intelligence API?▾
News Intelligence API is a ReefAPI endpoint group for news intelligence It returns live JSON through POST requests under /news-intel/v1.
Is the News Intelligence API free to try?▾
Yes. ReefAPI starts with 1,000 free credits, no card required. News Intelligence calls use the same shared credit balance as every other ReefAPI engine.
Do I need a News Intelligence login or account?▾
No login to News Intelligence is needed for the API response. You call ReefAPI with your x-api-key header, and the playground can run live examples before you create a production key.
How fresh is the News Intelligence data?▾
The page example is captured from a live search call, and production requests fetch live data through ReefAPI rather than a static sample.
How many credits does the News Intelligence API use?▾
News Intelligence actions currently cost 1-2 credits per successful call. Failed or blocked calls are free, and all APIs draw from one credit pool.
Can I call News Intelligence from an AI assistant or MCP client?▾
Yes. Connect ReefAPI once through MCP and your assistant can call news-intel actions with the same key, credit pool and JSON envelope used by normal REST requests.
25 Media, Film & Knowledge APIs on the same key
One key, one credit pool, one response envelope. If you are pulling News Intelligence, you are one call away from the rest of the category — no second contract, no second integration.
Need something this API does not do?
Name the endpoint, the field, or a source we do not carry yet. We ship new APIs every week and you would be first to get the key. Real people read every message and reply the same day.
Try it on your own data before you pay anything
The call above is the real endpoint, not a recording. A free key gives you 1,000 credits, the other 183 APIs, and the same envelope everywhere.
Endpoints, parameters and credit costs on this page are read from the live catalog and cannot drift from what the API accepts. Field notes were captured on 2026-08-30.