About

A free, keyless news search API. Built because AI agents cannot register for API keys, and every news API on the market requires one.

The problem

An autonomous agent that needs current information hits a wall immediately. Every news API wants a key. Getting a key means an email address, a confirmation link, a captcha, an accepted terms-of-service and often a payment card. An agent has none of those. So either a human sets it up in advance, or the agent goes without news.

We measured the whole field in August 2026: ten out of ten major news APIs return 401 to a keyless request. Including one with "free" in its domain name.

What we built

Full-text search over roughly 110,000 news articles a day from 25,000+ publishers in 90+ countries and 50+ languages, on a rolling 30-day window, refreshed continuously. Four GET endpoints, no authentication of any kind.

How it is paid for

Honestly: it barely costs anything.

The data comes from large-scale public news archives — bulk datasets of already-crawled news pages, released continuously. We do not license content from publishers and we do not fetch pages from their servers; we process datasets that are already public.

Thirty days of it, indexed and replicated three times, occupies about 3% of an Elasticsearch cluster we already run for other work. Serving a search query costs CPU time we have spare. Measured capacity is 1,247 requests per second; a single caller is limited to 20.

So this is not a loss leader waiting for a paywall. There is no burn to end.

Will it stay free

The word is in the domain. Basic keyless search stays free permanently — it is the product, not a promotion.

If load ever forces a change, it will be optional keys for accounting and higher personal limits, never a wall in front of the search itself. Anything that could earn money later sits beside the free tier, not on top of it: archive deeper than 30 days, an uptime guarantee, dedicated capacity. Any change is announced on the changelog before it happens.

Who runs it

A small independent team that operates search and data infrastructure — Elasticsearch clusters, crawlers and pipelines — as its day job. This service runs on that same infrastructure, which is precisely why it can be given away.

Contact

• Publishers requesting exclusion: see publishers. Requests are honoured, no argument.
• Bulk data: if you are planning tens of thousands of requests, get in touch first — there is a better way to hand you the data than HTTP.
• Bugs and wrong data: tell us which article and what is wrong. Wrong country or date labels are the most common, and the most useful to hear about.

Email [email protected].

What we do not do

• We do not host article content. Every response carries the original url — attribute and link back to it.
• We do not track you. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics scripts. See privacy.
• We do not rank publishers by credibility or apply a political filter. What Common Crawl reached is what you get, and that has consequences.