USA Today API Documentation

First request

Endpoint

GET /usatoday/article

Cost

2 credits/request

curl -X GET "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/usatoday/article?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fsports%2Fmlb%2Fdodgers%2F2026%2F09%2F23%2Fshohei-ohtani-return-from-il%2F91899080007%2F" \
  -H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"

How to use USA Today endpoints

Crawlora's USA Today endpoints read usatoday.com and return JSON for articles, staff profiles, section headlines, and the paper's national top-stories feed across all 13 of its sections — News, Sports, Entertainment, Life, Money, Tech, Travel, Opinion, Cars, Shopping, Weather, Politics, and Grocery. USA Today revises stories heavily after publication: a Sept. 22 MLB playoff-picture story pulled live on 2026-09-24 still carried a published_at nearly two days earlier than its updated_at, a gap the API surfaces on every article and headline. A second pull on 2026-10-27 re-checked the 13-slug section list and the cross-section feed.

1. Step 1

   List the section taxonomy

   /usatoday/sections returns all 13 top-level sections with their name, slug, and canonical usatoday.com URL.

2. Step 2

   Read the news section (91 rows)

   /usatoday/headlines takes one of those 13 slugs — sports, tech, money, and so on — and returns the newest items filed under it, each with title, url, image_url, published_at, and updated_at.

3. Step 3

   Skip a fresh headline URL that returns 404

   On 2026-10-30 a politics URL taken from the news section's headlines answered 404 USA Today article not found from /usatoday/article, so one dead URL should skip that item instead of failing the batch. Articles that do open return authors[], is_accessible_for_free, paragraphs[], published_at, section, title and updated_at.

4. Step 4

   Read a staff writer profile

   /usatoday/author reads a canonical staff page and returns the writer's name, bio, social accounts, and recent articles.

5. Step 5

   Watch the national feed

   /usatoday/news is the paper's site-wide top-stories feed, mixing national news, sports, and entertainment, each carrying both published_at and updated_at so you can detect revisions.

6. Step 6

   Page 13 sections, two of them large

   The sections route listed 13 slugs (news, sports, entertainment, life, money, tech, travel, opinion, cars, shopping, weather, politics, grocery). On 2026-10-30 news returned 91 rows from 2026-10-28 09:05 to 2026-10-30 01:27 UTC and sports returned 100 rows from 2026-10-28 19:14 to 2026-10-30 05:02 UTC, 65 of them also in the 100-row cross-section strip, so de-duplicate by URL.

7. Step 7

   Expect nanosecond timestamps and no bylines in the strip

   /usatoday/news returned 100 rows from 2026-10-28 19:14 to 2026-10-30 05:02 UTC with an image on 98 and no byline or summary on any, and published_at values carry nanoseconds such as 2026-10-30T05:02:33.318454005Z. Parse them as RFC 3339 with fractional seconds and take bylines from the article route.

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