Free News API

Try it

curl "https://alterlab.io/api/v1/news?q=chips&category=technology&limit=5"

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://alterlab.io/api/v1/news",
    params={"q": "climate", "since": "2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"},
    headers={"X-API-Key": "YOUR_FREE_KEY"},  # optional: higher limits
)
for item in r.json()["items"]:
    print(item["headline"], item["url"])

Filters

• q: Text to match in the headline or snippet
• category: world, technology, business, science, sports, general
• source: Source id, for example bbc, npr, guardian-world, aljazeera
• language: Language code, for example en or de
• since: ISO 8601 time; only items published after it
• limit: 1 to 100 items, default 20

What you get

Headline, URL, source, published time, author, image URL, a snippet of at most 300 characters and a category. There is no article text: every item links to the publisher. To read an article, scrape its URL with the AlterLab scrape API; that is one normal scrape on your balance. Each response includes an attribution credit (“News via AlterLab”) and a next_action hint.

Limits

Without a key: 60 requests per hour per IP. With a free API key: 1,000 requests per hour. Both are read from the cached index and cost nothing.

For agents (MCP)

The hosted MCP server exposes alterlab_news. It is public: no credentials and no credits. See the MCP server page to connect.