GDELT: Free News Monitoring for Your Trade or Town

The GDELT Project watches the world's news, from "nearly every corner of every country," in print, broadcast and web formats and "in over 100 languages." It turns that coverage into open data and offers free search tools on top. Use it to see what the news says about your trade, your products or your town.

Three ways to use it this week

• A tax preparer can list recent articles about IRS scams to warn clients about the ones going around right now.
• A car dealer can follow recall news for its brands.
• Any local business can chart how much news its town or industry is getting over the past few months and spot a sudden jump.

Try it now (no key, no account)

Open this link: api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/doc/doc?query="food truck" sourcecountry:US&mode=artlist&maxrecords=5&format=json

It lists up to five recent U.S. news articles that mention "food truck," with each headline, link, website, language and the date GDELT found it. Change the words after query= to your own topic. Swap mode=artlist for mode=timelinevol to get a coverage timeline instead.

When we tried it on October 13, 2026, it returned five articles from U.S. outlets, including a Tyler, Texas city council vote on a food truck park and a county warning about unlicensed food trucks. The answer comes back as raw data (JSON); add &format=html in place of &format=json for a page you can read in a browser.

Limits and rules

• The news search (called the DOC 2.0 API) covers the last 3 months by default. You can narrow it with timespan, for example timespan=1w for the past week.
• It returns up to 75 articles by default and up to 250 if you ask.
• Ask slowly. The service answers fast users with: "Please limit requests to one every 5 seconds." When we tested it on a busy day, it turned us away several times in a row, so a tool built on it should wait and retry.
• It searches news coverage in 65 languages, using machine translation.

License and credit

GDELT's terms say its datasets "are available for unlimited and unrestricted use for any academic, commercial, or governmental use of any kind without fee." The one condition: "any use or redistribution of the data must include a citation to the GDELT Project and a link to this website," meaning gdeltproject.org. The articles it points to belong to their publishers, so link to them rather than copying them.

Golden Rock can wire a GDELT news feed into a client's website or app, such as a page of recent coverage about their trade.

Who should care: owners who want to keep an eye on news about their trade or town.