Scrape Google News for Any Topic With Keyless RSS

Media monitoring tools are expensive, and most "news API" plans bill per call for data Google already gives away. If you just need recent articles for a topic, brand or ticker, Google News has a keyless RSS feed that covers it.

The feed

Every Google News search has an RSS version:

GET https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=tesla&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

No key, no header, no login. It returns up to about 100 <item> entries, each with a title, link, pubDate, and a <source url="..."> publisher. Three params control locale:

• hl is the language, e.g. en-US
• gl is the country, e.g. US
• ceid is country:language, e.g. US:en

Narrow by recency

The single most useful trick: Google News honors search operators inside q. Append when:1d or when:7d to get only recent items, which is exactly what monitoring needs:

?q=tesla%20when:1d

Parse it cleanly

RSS is regular, so a small parser is enough. With cheerio in XML mode:

import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';
const xml = await (await fetch(url)).text();
const $ = cheerio.load(xml, { xmlMode: true });
const rows = $('item').toArray().map((el) => {
  const it = $(el);
  const source = it.find('source').text().trim();
  let title = it.find('title').text().trim();
  if (source && title.endsWith(` - ${source}`)) title = title.slice(0, -(source.length + 3));
  return { title, source, url: it.find('link').text().trim(), publishedAt: it.find('pubDate').text().trim() };
});

One detail worth handling: Google News titles end with - Source, and the publisher is also in the <source> tag, so strip the suffix to get a clean headline.

I packaged it

I turned this into a small Actor on Apify so it is callable from code without wiring the feeds and parsing by hand. You pass search terms, a language and country, and a recency window, and it returns one row per article with headline, source, link and date. It joins a growing set of keyless scrapers I have been shipping. The first rows of every run are free so you can check the output first.

For brand monitoring, competitor tracking, or feeding a ticker news panel, this is usually all you need, and it costs nothing to run.