/guardian/articles/updates

POST /api/guardian/articles/updates

Price: 10 credits

List the individual updates of a Guardian live blog, newest first, walking back through the blog's history. Each update carries its own headline, text, timestamps, images, permalink and a flag marking whether the newsroom pinned it as a key event.

How to use it

Get the minute-by-minute entries of a Guardian live blog. Pass the live blog url or path (the ones where guardian/articles reports is_live_blog=true) and set count for how many updates you want — the walk goes as far back through the blog's history as needed. is_key_event marks the entries the newsroom highlighted. A url that is not a live blog returns 412.

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• article string required — Guardian live blog URL or its path (section/live/year/month/day/slug) (examples: "world/live/2026/aug/04/middle-east-crisis-qatar-iran-us-israel-war-donald-trump-strait-hormuz-gaza-latest-news-updates"; minLength: 1)
• count integer required — Max number of live updates to return (min: 1)

Response

• @type string (default: "GuardianLiveUpdate")
• id string required
• update_title string nullable
• text string nullable
• published_at integer nullable
• updated_at integer nullable
• web_url string nullable
• is_key_event boolean (default: false)
• images array (default: [])

Errors

• 422 — The request body did not validate Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — Not a Guardian live blog, or the page has no live updates Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.