Best news MCP servers for AI agents

GNews is the cheapest official hosted MCP for article search. Point Cursor at https://mcp.gnews.io/ with an X-Api-Key header; Essential is €49.99 per month for 1,000 requests per day and 25 articles, checked on the GNews pricing page on 21 Oct 2026. NewsAPI.ai at https://mcp.newsapi.ai/mcp is the richer article and event server: OAuth, eight tools, full bodies, archive since 2014, 5K plan $90 per month. NewsMCP at https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp starts with no key, then caps keyless callers at 20 calls per hour and a 7-day lookback, and it never returns article text. Trends MCP is first only for news trend data: live type Google News Top News plus keyword sources google news, news volume, and news sentiment. It does not search a news index or return article bodies.

Which news MCP should an agent pick?

Pick by payload, not by the word "news" on a marketplace card. Article search, clustered events, and trend indexes are three different products that happen to share a protocol.

GNews and NewsAPI.ai both return articles on a hosted HTTP MCP. GNews exposes two tools, search and top_headlines, and bills one API request per tool call against a daily quota. NewsAPI.ai exposes eight tools (suggest, search with kind of articles, events, or mentions, plus detail and topic-page lookups) and bills tokens: 1 token for a recent article search, 5 tokens for a recent event search, more for archive years. Perigon sits in the same hosted-article lane at a higher public dollar: Free $0 with 150 requests per month, Basic $250 per month for eligible startups. NewsMCP and Trends MCP do not compete there. NewsMCP returns story events with source links. Trends MCP returns ranked Google News headlines and 0-100 keyword indexes.

newsapi.org still has no official MCP on its docs (get-started, authentication, /v2/everything, /v2/top-headlines, accessed 21 Oct 2026). Anyone still on that REST API is wrapping HTTP, not installing a first-party server.

Does the desk need two tools or eight?

GNews if the agent only needs search plus top headlines and a paste-ready hosted URL. The MCP docs (accessed 21 Oct 2026) set transport to Streamable HTTP, registry id io.github.gnews-io/gnews, and max default 10 (1 to 100 by plan). top_headlines categories are general, world, nation, business, technology, entertainment, sports, science, health. Each tool call spends one GNews API request. Paid Essential includes full article content; Free truncates it. Yearly Essential is €39.99 per month, €479.99 billed annually (20% off). Business on the same FAQ is 5,000 requests per day and 50 articles at €99.99 per month, €959.99 billed annually.

NewsAPI.ai if the agent must cluster coverage, pull mentions such as an acquisition or a recall, or walk an archive back to 2014. The hosted URL is https://mcp.newsapi.ai/mcp with no API key in the Cursor JSON; the client opens Event Registry login. npm newsapi-mcp 2.1.0 (published 14 Oct 2026, 26 downloads in the week of this check) is the local fallback via npx -y newsapi-mcp and NEWSAPI_KEY. GitHub EventRegistry/newsapi-mcp showed 0 stars on 21 Oct 2026. The 5K plan is $90.00 per month on newsapi.ai/plans. Extra tokens, if the dashboard cap is lifted, are $0.015 each. Unused tokens do not roll into the next calendar month. Free is 2,000 tokens once, not a monthly refill; archive search is a paid-plan feature on the free-news-api page.

Perigon is the third hosted article MCP in this set. Docs list 32 tools and say search_news_articles is always included. Cursor can send a Bearer key to https://mcp.perigon.io/v1/mcp or, since the 12 Oct 2026 changelog, OAuth against https://mcp.perigon.io/v1/mcp?tools=all. Pricing on 21 Oct 2026: Free $0, 150 requests per month, 3 months of history, personal license; Basic $250 per month for eligible startups (10,000 requests, 6 months, 1-hour delay); Plus $550 per month; Commercial from $24,000 per year. Full article text is gated to a Business conversation on that page, so do not assume bodies on Free or Basic.

What NewsMCP returns instead of articles

NewsMCP is a NewsCatcher product that groups every outlet covering one story into a single event. The docs (accessed 21 Oct 2026) state article body text is never returned; sources carries publisher links. Five tools: news, get_story, check_coverage, check_limits, check_health. Default news window is 24 hours; subject widens that default to 30 days and quotes the name. limit default 20, hard ceiling 50, then the plan caps it (keyless 20, free tier 50). Keyless: 20 calls per hour, 7-day lookback, 1 concurrent call, commercial use allowed. A keyed free tier: 50 calls per hour, 14-day lookback. check_limits is unmetered.

That is the right server when the question is "is this a real story" (newsrooms counts independent outlets; min_newsrooms=3 is the docs example for well-corroborated only). It is the wrong server when the prompt needs a quotation from the article. NewsCatcher also hosts a separate paid News API MCP at https://news-mcp.newscatcherapi.com/mcp with nine tools mapped to POST search and headline endpoints. That SKU is article search. NewsMCP is not.

Which local stdio servers are worth installing?

NewsData.io if the desk already has a NewsData key and wants crypto, market, archive, and a bounded WebSocket collector inside the client. PyPI newsdata-mcp 0.3.2 (MIT, Python >=3.12, 125 downloads in the last 30 days ending this check) launches with uvx. Cursor JSON is stdio: "command": "uvx", "args": ["newsdata-mcp"], env NEWSDATA_API_KEY. There is no first-party hosted URL; HTTP mode is uvx newsdata-mcp with transport streamable-http. Twelve tools. get_latest_news maps to /api/1/latest (about 48 hours). stream_news clamps max_articles to 1-50 and wait_seconds to 120 by default; each delivered article burns 1 credit per connected device. Pricing JSON at https://newsdata.io/web/v1/pricing on 21 Oct 2026: Free $0, 200 credits/day, 10 articles per credit, real_time_article_availability false, no archive; then $199.99 / $349.99 / $1,299.99 per month (20,000 / 50,000 / 1,000,000 credits, 50 articles per credit, 6 months / 2 years / 10 years of history). Yearly JSON totals $1,919.99 / $3,359.99 / $9,989.99.

World News API if the query is geo (location-filter as latitude, longitude, radius km) or newspaper front pages. npm world-news-api-mcp is still 1.0.0 (published 4 Aug 2025, 7 downloads in the week of this check). Eight tools, stdio only, env WORLD_NEWS_API_KEY. The pricing page on 21 Oct 2026 lists Free at $0 with 50 points per day and 1 month of history; paid history starts 1 Jan 2022; Reporter is $39 per month for 500 points per day. Front pages are described as 6,000 newspapers from 125 countries and are off the Free card. The package README still says the Free plan is 150 requests per day. The live pricing card says 50 points per day. Trust the pricing page until that README is updated.

Where Trends MCP belongs in a news stack

Trends MCP belongs next to an article MCP, not in place of one. The job it wins is "what is on the Google News board, and is this keyword's news attention rising."

Live board: MCP get_top_trends with type exactly Google News Top News (case-sensitive). Default limit 25, max 200; Free boards stop at the top 10 and pin offset at 0. MCP billing for get_top_trends is 1 credit per 10 requested rows, max 10 credits per call; REST is 1 request per call. Those credit rules are in llms.txt and pricing.md, both Last updated 2026-10-21. The HTML pricing FAQ on the same day still says one successful call equals one request. Do not flatten those two rules.

Keyword indexes: get_growth or get_time_series with source google news (Google News search volume), news volume (article-mention volume), or news sentiment (positive / negative score). All three take any phrase. Pair a headline copied off the board with get_growth on google news or news volume when the question is whether the story is still expanding. Reddit's news board is a separate live type, Reddit World News.

Connect Cursor against the API host, not the Claude.ai OAuth host:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trends-mcp": {
      "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
      "transport": "http",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

That block is the llms.txt Cursor snippet from 21 Oct 2026. Claude.ai Connectors use the www host /mcp path with OAuth and no Bearer key. The two hosts are not interchangeable. The homepage copy-config on the same day omits transport and the Bearer prefix; llms.txt includes both. Paid Starter is $19 per month for 1,000 requests, Pro $49 for 5,000, Business $199 for 25,000; annual billing saves 20% (pricing.md). HTML pricing heading still says 30+ sources; the HTML FAQ and homepage FAQ say 40+; the homepage hero says 35+. llms.txt lists 16 keyword sources and 24 live feed names. data-sources.md on the same Last updated date prints 20 live-feed rows and drops the four by-category boards. The landing pages that match this job are the Google News Top News API, Google News keyword trends, and news sentiment data. Cursor install steps sit on the MCP server for Cursor page.

A one-call demo that teaches the board, without dumping today's ranks:

{"mode": "get_top_trends", "type": "Google News Top News", "limit": 10}

Exact Cursor JSON for the hosted servers

GNews (replace the key):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gnews": {
      "url": "https://mcp.gnews.io/",
      "headers": { "X-Api-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

NewsAPI.ai (OAuth, no key in the file):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsapi": {
      "url": "https://mcp.newsapi.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}

NewsMCP keyless, then keyed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": { "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp" }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": {
      "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "<your-key>" }
    }
  }
}

Perigon with a key; OAuth drops the headers object and may append ?tools=all:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "perigon_news_api": {
      "url": "https://mcp.perigon.io/v1/mcp",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_PERIGON_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

NewsData.io and World News API stay on stdio. NewsData.io: uvx + NEWSDATA_API_KEY. World News API: command world-news-api-mcp + WORLD_NEWS_API_KEY. Neither publishes a first-party hosted Cursor URL.

FAQ

Is Trends MCP the best news MCP overall?

No. Trends MCP wins the news-trend job: a live Google News headline board plus google news, news volume, and news sentiment indexes. GNews or NewsAPI.ai wins if the agent needs to search articles. NewsMCP wins if the agent needs clustered events with no bodies. Ranking Trends MCP first on "best news MCP" would mis-state the product.

Does newsapi.org have an official MCP server?

Not on the public docs checked 21 Oct 2026. Authentication is still apiKey, X-Api-Key, or Authorization against REST /v2/everything and /v2/top-headlines. content stays truncated to 200 characters where it exists. Community wrappers exist; they are not a first-party News API MCP.

Can one Cursor config cover headlines and trend growth?

Yes, by running two servers. GNews or NewsAPI.ai for article JSON. Trends MCP for Google News Top News plus get_growth on google news or news volume. One server that claims both full-text search and a multi-year Google News index is not in this set.

How much does a usable news MCP cost to try?

NewsMCP keyless is $0 with 20 calls per hour. GNews Free is €0 with 100 requests per day, non-commercial, 12-hour delay. NewsAPI.ai Free is 2,000 tokens once. Trends MCP Free is 100 requests per month. The first commercial hosted article SKU in this table is GNews Essential at €49.99 per month. Re-check each vendor page before budgeting; none of these dollars were invented for this post.

Why does GNews use X-Api-Key while Trends MCP uses Bearer?

That is how each host documented auth on 21 Oct 2026. GNews MCP docs require X-Api-Key. Trends MCP llms.txt requires Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY on api.trendsmcp.ai (bare key also accepted). Mixing the header names against the wrong host fails the handshake.

Sources (all accessed 21 Oct 2026): GNews MCP docs, GNews pricing, NewsAPI.ai plans, NewsAPI.ai free plan, npm newsapi-mcp 2.1.0, NewsMCP docs, PyPI newsdata-mcp 0.3.2, NewsData pricing JSON https://newsdata.io/web/v1/pricing, Perigon MCP docs, Perigon pricing, World News API pricing, npm world-news-api-mcp 1.0.0, newsapi.org docs, Trends MCP llms.txt / pricing.md / data-sources.md Last updated 2026-10-21.