The Guardian Open Platform

Official Guardian API providing access to over 2 million articles with full text, tags, and section filtering.

Status
🟢 Online · 1621 ms

30-day uptime
94.15%

Free tier
500 calls/day, free key, no credit card (test key available)

Auth
API key

Last 30 days

Free alternatives (live ranking)

Hacker News API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, no credit card
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Wikipedia REST API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent

Compare The Guardian Open Platform with…

The Guardian Open Platform vs Hacker News API — Unlimited, no key, no credit card
The Guardian Open Platform vs DEV Community API — 30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
The Guardian Open Platform vs Wikipedia REST API — Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent

Paid alternatives

Guardian Commercial API — contact sales

Official docs ↗

Frequently Asked Questions

Does The Guardian Open Platform require an API key?

Yes, The Guardian Open Platform requires a free API key. You can sign up via https://open-platform.theguardian.com/documentation/.

What is The Guardian Open Platform's free tier?

500 calls/day, free key, no credit card (test key available)

Is The Guardian Open Platform currently online?

We check The Guardian Open Platform every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.

Implementation notes

When to use The Guardian Open Platform

The Guardian Open Platform is the most developer-friendly major newspaper API. Its test key (`api-key=test`) works immediately without registration for exploration, and the free production key allows 500 calls/day with full article metadata including tags, sections, and contributor bylines.

Common pitfalls

The test key (`api-key=test`) is rate-limited to 12 calls per second and returns slightly degraded data — some metadata fields are stripped. For development work beyond initial exploration, register for a real free key.
Full article body text requires the `show-fields=body` parameter. The default response returns only a short trail text (typically the article's first sentence). Many developers miss this and build on incomplete data.
The Guardian's taxonomy uses 'sections' (e.g., `technology`, `sport`) and 'tags' (finer-grained topics). Filtering by tag is significantly more precise than filtering by section, but the tag IDs are opaque strings like `technology/apple` rather than human-readable names.
Historical coverage goes back to 1999 but article body text for articles before 2010 is often missing or incomplete — the Guardian did not digitise older archives fully. Filter by `from-date` and expect gaps.

Quick start (bash)

curl "https://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence&show-fields=trail-text,byline&page-size=5&api-key=test"

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