GDELT Context Search API

Endpoint facts

Method

GET

API path

/gdelt/context

Auth

apiKey

Credits

0 credits/request

Platform

GDELT

Response schema

#/definitions/gdelt.contextResponseDoc

Overview

Search recent (last 72 hours) GDELT-monitored news for Developers commonly use this endpoint for data enrichment, monitoring, research dashboards, internal automation, and agent-native workflows that need repeatable structured public web data. Authentication uses the documented Crawlora headers, and usage is metered with the credit cost shown on this page.

Authentication

Send your scraping API key in the x-api-key header. Use the console API Keys page to rotate or select the active key.

Billing

Endpoint usage is metered in credits. The plan prices, included credits, limits, and overage rates below match the active backend billing configuration.

Credit cost

0 credits/request

Charged response

Successful 2xx responses

Infrastructure behavior

This endpoint is executed through Crawlora's managed scraping infrastructure.

• Proxy strategy: managed automatically where needed
• Browser rendering: enabled for supported targets that require rendered HTML or JavaScript execution
• Browser cluster: supported dynamic workloads can be routed through distributed browser instances
• Retry behavior: automatic retry/fallback may be used depending on endpoint type
• Challenge handling: challenged pages or unusable upstream HTML are detected and surfaced clearly when they cannot be used
• Billing: credits are charged only for successful 2xx responses
• Observability: responses include request context where available

Response behavior

- `sentence` is the single matching sentence (GDELT returns at most one matching sentence per article); `context` is the surrounding paragraph. - `count` is the number of articles actually returned (0 is a valid, legitimate "no matches" result, distinct from an upstream error). - `source_url` is the exact upstream GDELT Context API URL used for the call. - A GDELT-side rate limit, a timespan/date range GDELT itself rejects as out of its 72-hour window, or an unrecognized/malformed upstream response surfaces as a `503` upstream error, not a `200` with empty/wrong data. An out-of-range `timespan` is instead rejected client-side as a `400` before ever reaching GDELT (see the `timespan` note above); an out-of-range `from`/`to` combination is not independently validated client-side and falls through to GDELT's own `503`-classified rejection. Example response: ```json { "code": 200, "msg": "OK", "data": { "query": "climate change", "sort": "relevance", "maxrecords": 75, "count": 1, "source_url": "https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/context/context?format=json&maxrecords=75&mode=artlist&query=climate+change&timespan=24h", "fetched_at": "2026-08-20T10:00:00Z", "articles": [ { "url": "https://www.example.com/news/climate-report", "title": "Climate report warns of rising sea levels", "seen_at": "2026-08-19T23:00:00Z", "domain": "example.com", "language": "ENGLISH", "social_image_url": "https://www.example.com/images/social.jpg", "is_quote": false, "sentence": "Coastal cities face rising seas driven by accelerating climate change.", "context": "The report, released Tuesday, warns that coastal cities face rising seas driven by accelerating climate change. Officials called for immediate action." } ] } } ```

Error behavior

Crawlora does not silently return bad data when the upstream page cannot be used.

When possible, Crawlora returns structured error context so your integration can retry, back off, or inspect the request.

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