# Ground News

> Ground News is a news aggregation and media-comparison platform built by Snapwise Inc.
> of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and backed by Techstars. It gathers coverage of each
> news event from across the political spectrum and pairs every story with media bias
> ratings, factuality assessments and source-ownership transparency. Its signature
> surfaces are the Blindspot Feed (stories disproportionately covered by one side), the
> per-story left/center/right coverage-distribution bar, a My News Bias dashboard,
> local news, daily briefing newsletters, browser extensions and iOS/Android apps.
> Bias ratings are described by Ground News as the average of three independent
> monitors — AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check — combined with its
> own human and machine analysis.

## Status — no public API

- Ground News publishes **no public API**. Re-probed 2026-08-13 under full contract
  discovery: no developer portal, no API reference, no OpenAPI or Swagger, no GraphQL
  schema, no AsyncAPI, no webhook catalog, no SDK in any package registry, no CLI, no
  Postman collection, no MCP server, no agent card, and no sandbox.
- Probed and missed on ground.news: `/openapi.json`, `/swagger.json`, `/api-docs`,
  `/graphql`, `/api`, `/developers`, `/llms.txt` and every `/.well-known/` path
  (`security.txt`, `openid-configuration`, `oauth-authorization-server`, `api-catalog`,
  `ai-plugin.json`, `agent-card.json`, and the legacy `agent.json`) — all 404.
- The subdomains a developer would try do not exist: `developer.`, `developers.`,
  `docs.`, `status.`, `trust.` and `web-api.ground.news` are all NXDOMAIN, and there is
  no `api.groundnews.com`.
- There **is** one live machine surface, and it is not for you: `api.ground.news`
  resolves and runs an Express origin behind CloudFront, backing the Ground News web
  and mobile apps. It answers **HTTP 418 "I'm a Teapot" to every path**, including the
  root. Nothing about it is published — no reference, no key issuance, no terms. It is
  the app's private backend. Do not treat it as an integration point.
- There is **no Ground News GitHub organisation**. `github.com/snapWise` exists but is
  an unrelated Austrian organisation named Berrinex with zero repositories — a name
  collision, not Ground News.
- No first-party client library exists on npm, PyPI or RubyGems.
- Because there is no API, third parties scrape Ground News instead (a commercial Apify
  actor sells scraped Ground News bias and coverage data), and several AI-generated
  content-farm pages describe a "Ground News API" with sign-up steps that correspond to
  nothing Ground News publishes. Treat any such claim as unverified.

## The one real integration surface: the story widget

Ground News publishes exactly one embeddable component, documented by example on its
own site at https://about.ground.news/widget:

```html
<iframe width=500 height=600 src="https://ground.news/widget/story?offset=1"></iframe>
```

- Server-rendered card showing the current top story: headline, image, source count and
  the left/center/right coverage-distribution bar.
- `offset` (query, integer) selects which story in the current ordering to render. The
  provider's own embed uses `offset=1`; `offset=3` returns a different story. No range,
  default or error behaviour is documented.
- No authentication. No rate limits, SLA, versioning or deprecation policy are
  published for it.
- It sets first-party cookies and loads Google Tag Manager into the embedding page —
  relevant to any embedder with a consent obligation.
- Only this one embed exists; `/widget` and `/widget/blindspot` both 404.

## Commercial

- Consumer subscription only. The public pricing page currently renders a single tier,
  **Vantage at $8.33/month billed annually**, including Blindspot analysis, the global
  coverage map, unlimited saved stories, full coverage comparison, ownership & funding
  transparency, bias & factuality ratings and the My News Bias dashboard.
- A free, no-account reading tier exists in practice but is not itemised or priced.
- **No plan includes API access**, and no data or developer plan is published. Group
  subscriptions, gifting, the affiliate program and Ground Education all sit behind
  contact forms with no published terms.

## Where to go instead of an API

- Blog RSS: https://ground.news/blog/rss
- Newsletters: /newsletters/daily-ground, /newsletters/blindspot-report,
  /newsletters/burst-your-bubble
- Rating methodology: https://ground.news/rating-system
- Help centre: https://help.ground.news
- Contact: feedback@ground.news · privacy@ground.news · +1 (866) 471-9181 ·
  Snapwise Inc., 280 Joseph St, Kitchener, ON, Canada N2G 4Z5
- Institutional/classroom access (the closest thing to a data-licensing motion, and it
  is a sales gate): https://about.ground.news/contact-ground-ed

## Crawling policy

`https://ground.news/robots.txt` allows all agents on `/` except `/mediaopoly`, blocks
YandexBot, Yandex, AhrefsBot, Yeti and all image crawlers, and **explicitly allows
GPTBot**. `/sitemap.xml` returns 403.

## Profile

- API Evangelist profile: https://apis.io/provider/ground
- Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/ground/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
- Generated by the API Evangelist enrichment pipeline, 2026-08-13. Not published by
  Ground News.