From a curious idea
to your first news query.

Start at the source.

Register on NewsAPI.ai to get your API key. You can explore this community site without an account; running queries requires a provider account.

Keep the key in your client’s configuration, an n8n credential, or a server environment variable. Do not commit a real key to GitHub or put it into browser-side application code.

Choose what you’re building.

Ask for something specific.

For an MCP assistant, start with a narrow topic and a recent time window. Here is an example prompt to adapt:

Find five recent articles about AI regulation from the past week. Summarize the main developments, include each source URL and publication date, and point out any conflicting reporting.

This is a prompt idea, not a live result. Inspect the returned articles before relying on the summary. A date, an original link, and a clear distinction between reporting and inference make the output more useful.

If your tools do not appear, check Node.js, the API key setting, and your client’s MCP logs against the official server README. For n8n, begin with a manual execution and inspect the HTTP Request node output.

Free to start. Clear about limits.

Your free plan includes 2,000 searches. Once they’re used, upgrade to a paid plan to keep going.

The MCP project describes this as a one-time allocation of 2,000 API tokens. These are NewsAPI.ai usage credits, separate from language-model tokens. Request type and pagination affect how much you use.

Review the official plan details and account usage before running repeated or scheduled queries. Registration, credit allocation, upgrades, and billing are managed by NewsAPI.ai.

Before you build.