AskNews
Emergent Methods, LLC · Coding
AskNews is a news API and research platform that feeds AI systems licensed, enriched news context from a single natural language query, along with DeepNews research, alerts, and a knowledge graph.
About AskNews
What Is AskNews
AskNews is the news layer that Emergent Methods builds for AI products, sold as a news API for LLMs and agent stacks. It collects reporting from hundreds of thousands of open web sources and thousands of licensed outlets, then reshapes that flow into context a language model can read fast. The company says its pipeline indexes about 500,000 new articles every day.
Most teams that want news inside an app end up maintaining scrapers, fixing broken parsers, and hitting paywalls. AskNews sells the finished layer instead, and positions itself as a news intelligence platform rather than a feed. One query returns enriched articles, a summary, or a full research report, with metadata on people, places, and tone attached.
The tradeoff is that AskNews is infrastructure, not a consumer news app. You bring an API key, and usually your own model.
Getting Started
- Sign up at my.asknews.app and create an API key. The free pay-as-you-go tier comes with 25 credits, so you can test before paying.
- Install the Python or TypeScript SDK, or connect the MCP server or CLI if your agent already speaks that protocol.
- Send a natural language query such as "semiconductor export controls and TSMC capacity" and choose what comes back: raw articles, enriched articles, or a synthesized answer.
- Watch your credit and token usage in the dashboard, then move to Pro or Analyst once the included allowance runs low.
Product Information
A quick look at AskNews's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Forecasting analysts
- Developers building AI agents
- Risk and intelligence teams
- Journalists and researchers
Tasks
- Grounding a chatbot in current events
- Tracking a company or topic over time
- Deep research on a messy question
Scenarios
- Running a weekly news digest for clients
- Checking a claim before publication
- Building a market monitoring dashboard
Key features
Natural Language News Search
Real-time news search is the core endpoint: it takes a plain question and returns matching reporting from the last few days, ranked by relevance rather than keyword overlap. You can ask for raw articles, enriched articles with entity and sentiment tags, or a short synthesized answer. Response times sit under 100 ms for prompt-optimized calls in North America, according to the company.
DeepNews Agentic Research
DeepNews runs multiple research passes instead of one retrieval. It moves between paywalled news, the open web, X, Reddit, Wikipedia, and podcasts, then keeps digging based on what it finds. That makes it useful for questions with no clean answer, such as how a policy change ripples through a supply chain.
Licensed and Paywalled Coverage
AskNews licenses content from thousands of outlets, including premium sources such as Forbes, AP, and AFP. Reaching that material through an API is the main reason teams pick it over a scraper. Access depends on your plan, and commercial redistribution requires an Enterprise license.
Historical News Archive
The archive holds more than 200 million articles and lets you query well beyond the rolling news window. You can pull coverage from a specific month, compare how two outlets framed an event, or build a long-run dataset for backtesting.
Knowledge Graph and Story Tracking
AskNews links people, organizations, places, and events into a graph, and clusters related articles into stories. Sentiment, actor, and voice metadata come attached, so you can measure how coverage shifted instead of reading every piece yourself.
Alerts and Forecasting Support
You can write an alert in natural language and route notifications to your preferred channel. Forecasting and threat monitoring workflows sit on top of the same data, with time-series charts for mentions and sentiment. Metaculus forecasting staff have said their in-house bots moved to AskNews for tournament work.
MCP Server, CLI, and SDKs
The MCP news server lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other agent frameworks call AskNews as a tool without custom glue code. A command line client covers terminal work, scripts, and CI, while the Python and TypeScript SDKs handle production integrations. Documentation includes an OpenAPI spec for generated clients.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Licensed news data reaches paywalled reporting that scrapers can't touch, which matters for research and risk work.
- Enrichment is included by default, with sentiment, entities, and story clustering arriving alongside the text.
- A free pay-as-you-go allowance of 25 credits makes the first test cheap, and Pro starts at $7.99 per month.
- The same account covers REST, SDKs, CLI, and MCP, so one key works across prototypes and production agents.
Cons
- Credit and token pricing takes real arithmetic to forecast. A graph call costs 15 credits, so heavy research workloads can burn through an allowance faster than expected.
- The best material sits behind higher plans. Reddit on-demand access is limited to Analyst and Enterprise, and commercial redistribution needs Enterprise.
- It returns context, not finished answers. You still need your own model, prompt design, and evaluation to turn that context into a product.
Frequently asked questions
AskNews gives AI applications access to current and historical news. Teams use it to ground chatbots, run forecasting research, monitor companies and topics, and build news-driven dashboards.
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