NewsAPI is an article search API. GET /v2/everything searches articles by keyword, date, and language. GET /v2/top-headlines returns current headlines by country and category. The response is article metadata: title, description, URL, source, publishedAt. It does not count mentions, score tone, or cover anything outside news. Trends API is the measurement layer: news volume and news sentiment keyword sources return normalized 0-100 series from one POST, and Google News Top News is a live headline board. Request shape is on the API reference.
What NewsAPI returns
Both endpoints return a list of articles. For a "how much coverage" question, the caller pages results, counts rows per day, and builds a private scale. Result caps and pagination make those counts unstable for high-coverage topics, and a count still says nothing about tone. Check NewsAPI's current docs for plan limits on history and page size before designing around this.
The measurement version of news
POST https://api.trendsapi.ai/api
Authorization: Bearer <api_key>
Content-Type: application/json
{"mode":"get_growth","source":"news volume","keyword":"openai","percent_growth":["3M","12M"]}
news volume is mention counts rescaled to 0-100 against the keyword's own history. news sentiment is the tone score for the same keyword. Growth windows are preset strings, so a two-date comparison is one call. body in the response is a JSON string and must be parsed a second time. Source strings are on the sources reference.
For the current headline board, get_top_trends with type Google News Top News returns the live ranking. No keyword. Feed strings are on the live feeds reference.
News next to search and social
Every source on Trends API shares the 0-100 scale, so news volume sits on the same axis as Google search, Reddit, or YouTube. "Did coverage lead search interest?" becomes two calls and one chart. With an article search API, that question needs a second vendor for every non-news source. Worked examples: newsroom trends and crisis monitoring.
When NewsAPI is the right object
Keep NewsAPI when the product reads articles: a headline list, an archive, a clipping feed. Switch when the question is how much coverage, which direction, or what tone. Trends API caps sit on pricing.