Effort levels

Every search scores each article on relevance to your request, the authority of its publisher, how many newsrooms cover its story and how fresh it is. effort decides how much further work goes into the order.

Effort	What it adds	Credits
`low`	Nothing: the first ranking is the answer. Fastest.	1 NCC
`medium` (default)	A cross-encoder rerank of the top stories.	5 NCC
`high`	An LLM judgement of the top stories, and merges stories that report the same event. Slowest, best quality.	10 NCC

curl -X POST "https://api.newscatcherapi.com/news-api/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: $NEWSCATCHER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"q": "EU AI Act enforcement", "effort": "high"}'

The response repeats the effort that ran in effort, and how long the search took in took_ms.

Which effort to use

low: high volume, keyword-style queries

Feeds, alerts and dashboards that send many searches with clear keywords, where speed and price matter more than the exact order.

medium: the default for most requests

Questions in plain words, user-facing search and agent tool calls.

high: when the top results must be right

Research, briefings and reports, where a wrong top result costs more than the extra seconds. Stories about the same event are merged, so the top results cover more distinct events.

Rate limits per effort

Your plan sets requests per second for each effort level. See Rate limits.

Get started

News API

Agent

Resources

Which effort to use

Rate limits per effort

​Which effort to use

​Rate limits per effort

Which effort to use

Rate limits per effort