How to build a news aggregator with an API

Building a news aggregator sounds like a scraping project: crawlers, parsers, dedup, language detection, ranking. Most of that is undifferentiated plumbing. Here's how to skip it and stand one up on a single structured API.

Don't scrape — pull structured data

Scraping means maintaining crawlers per site, fighting layout changes, handling rate limits, and building your own dedup and scoring. A structured news API hands you the finished feed: text plus urgency, political_lean, topic_tags, country_tags and cluster_id. You spend your time on product, not plumbing.

1. Get a key and pull a feed

The free tier is enough to prototype end to end — 100 requests/day of the full enriched schema, no card. See what the free tier includes.

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.newsagentdata.com/v1/feed?min_score=4&days=1"

2. Filter to your niche

An aggregator is only useful if it's focused. Country, topic and language are separate axes, so you can build “LatAm markets,” “Ukraine defense,” or “German energy” without keyword lists:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.newsagentdata.com/v1/feed?country=br&topic=markets&language=pt&days=2"

3. De-duplicate and rank

Group by cluster_id so each event appears once, then rank by urgency (and cluster_size for what's spreading). That gives a clean, ranked front page with no ML on your side. Details in the clustering guide.

4. Cache and refresh

Don't call the API per page view. Pull on a short interval (or subscribe to a webhook / stream), cache the result, and serve users from cache. This keeps you well inside rate limits and makes the app fast.

5. Attribute and scale

Source names and links come in on the paid tiers, so you can credit outlets and link out. When you outgrow the free limits, the same schema continues — only the quotas change. Compare options in the news API comparison and the pricing page.