Data sources & coverage
Every dataset behind the API — its source, licence, coverage window, refresh cadence, and known limits. The first group is what we produce — events we code, stories we cluster, entities we resolve — built from open inputs but not taken from them ready-made. The rest is what we ingest. Coverage figures were last measured against production on 2026-07-20.
For how the pipeline works end to end, see Methodology. For the vendors that process customer data, see Subprocessors.
What we produce
The core datasets are GDELT Cloud’s own output — we code the events, cluster the stories, resolve the entities, and score the tone. The open feeds in the Inputs column are what these are built from, not where they come from ready-made.
| Dataset | Source | Licence | Coverage | Refresh | Known limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Events Core Data · /api/v2/events | GDELT Cloud Built from GDELT | Proprietary | March 2026 → present | Hourly | Every event is coded by GDELT Cloud under our own CAMEO+ taxonomy, not taken from an upstream event feed. History before March 2026 is being backfilled and is incomplete. Event geography is city-level at best — most events resolve to a country or regional centroid, so they should not be treated as point locations. |
Conflict events (ACLED-style) Core Data · /api/v2/events | GDELT Cloud Built from GDELT | Proprietary | March 2026 → present | Hourly | Independently coded using ACLED’s published methodology and taxonomy. Not sourced from, endorsed by, or affiliated with ACLED, and not comparable row-for-row with ACLED’s own dataset. Beta. |
Stories Core Data · /api/v2/stories | GDELT Cloud Built from GDELT | Proprietary | March 2026 → present | Hourly | Article clusters we build ourselves. They are re-evaluated as coverage arrives, so a story’s article set can change within its first day. |
Entities Core Data · /api/v2/entities, /api/v2/search | GDELT Cloud Built from GDELT + public registries | Proprietary | March 2026 → present | Hourly, with daily reconciliation | Our resolved entity spine, cross-walked to public registry identifiers where they exist. An entity with no registry match resolves on name alone and is weaker, and an unresolvable name returns no match rather than a guess. |
Media tone & share of voice Core Analytics · /api/v2/entity-tone, /api/v2/share-of-voice | GDELT Cloud Built from GDELT | Proprietary | March 2026 → present | Hourly | Scored by us across news coverage. Tone is measured only where an entity is actually covered — an absent bucket means no measured coverage, never a neutral reading. Social posts are NOT an input to tone: the social surface is a separate, admin-only preview endpoint that queries Bluesky live and is not blended into these scores. Early access. |
Atlas geopolitical indices Intelligence · /api/v2/intelligence/gpr | GDELT Cloud Built from Our own coded events and stories | Proprietary | World and continent daily from April 2026; country coverage is thin | Daily | Preview — the page is open to signed-in users but the API and MCP tools are Admin-plan only, and the baseline is provisional because the underlying event history only begins in March 2026. Country-level coverage is the binding limit: measured over 107 days, only 2 countries clear the per-country coverage floor on 90+ days and 12 clear it on most days, so every other country is returned as null rather than a fabricated score. Treat world and continent as usable and country as preview. Not derived from, or comparable to, the Federal Reserve’s published GPR index. |
What we fuse
Multiple public registries joined into one keyed surface and resolved against the entity spine.
| Dataset | Source | Licence | Coverage | Refresh | Known limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Facilities directory Core Data · /api/v2/facilities | Global Energy Monitor + NGA World Port Index + Epoch AI | CC-BY-4.0 (GEM, Epoch AI) · US Public Domain (NGA) | Power, industry, fuel transport, ports and data centers | On source publication | About 99% carry coordinates; the remainder are pipelines and oil & gas fields, which are lines and areas rather than points. Roughly half carry an owner resolved to the entity spine — strongest for heavy industry and data centers, weakest for power. Ports carry no owner at all: the World Port Index is a navigational dataset with no ownership layer, so this is a boundary of the source, not a backlog. |
Open feeds we ingest
Public datasets we ingest, clean, and — where the source supports an identifier — resolve onto the same entity spine as everything else.
| Dataset | Source | Licence | Coverage | Refresh | Known limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Federal awards Open Feeds · /api/v2/gov/awards | USAspending.gov | US Public Domain | Prime awards, keyed on UEI | Weekly | Prime awards only. Sub-award chains are not ingested, so exposure through subcontractors is not represented. |
Foreign influence Open Feeds · /api/v2/gov/fara | DOJ NSD — FARA eFile | US Public Domain | Registrant ↔ foreign-principal links | Weekly | Reflects what registrants filed. Non-registration is not observable, so absence is not evidence of no relationship. |
Corporate filings Open Feeds · /api/v2/filings | SEC EDGAR | US Public Domain | Filing index and XBRL financials | Hourly, within SEC fair-access limits | US registrants only — a private or foreign-only company has no EDGAR footprint. Supplier and subsidiary relations extracted from filing text are our interpretation of the document, not statements by the filer. |
AI & compute Open Feeds · /api/v2/epoch/* | Epoch AI | CC-BY-4.0 | Models, hardware, data centers, chip sales | On source publication | Epoch’s data-center registry is a curated set of the largest known clusters, not a census. Coordinates are geocoded from published addresses, not supplied by the source. |
Energy assets Open Feeds · /api/v2/energy/* | Global Energy Monitor | CC-BY-4.0 | Power, fuel transport and heavy-industry trackers | On GEM release | Capacity units differ by tracker — power is MW while heavy industry is tonnes per annum — so capacity is not summable across asset classes. |
Governance & democracy Structural indicators · powers the Atlas Posture structural axis | World Bank (WDI / Worldwide Governance Indicators) + V-Dem Institute | CC-BY-4.0 (World Bank) · Open with citation requested (V-Dem) | 176 countries, 1990–2025, annual | On source publication (annual) | Annual and lagged — V-Dem v16 carries a 2025-03-10 vintage and the World Bank indicators trail by one to two years, so these describe a country’s standing condition and can never move on the news. V-Dem indices are expert-coded survey aggregates with published uncertainty intervals; we store the point estimate only. V-Dem publishes no formal licence — its FAQ grants free use for anyone without permission and asks to be cited, which is how these rows are marked. |
Markets & macro Open Feeds · /api/v2/macro/* | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED / ALFRED) | Mixed — per-series; redistribution-restricted series are excluded | Series with true point-in-time vintages | Daily | Series whose upstream terms restrict redistribution are filtered out of every query rather than served with a caveat. GDELT Cloud is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Observations cannot predate 1970. |
Restricted-party lists Open Feeds · /api/v2/lists, /api/v2/screening/match | trade.gov Consolidated Screening List (OFAC, BIS, State), UN Security Council, UK Sanctions List, US DoD Section 1260H | US Public Domain (CSL, 1260H) · open publication (UN, UK) | 14 lists, with a daily change feed | Daily | Analytical coverage, not an audit-grade compliance control — use a compliance-grade provider for screening decisions. Country filtering is derived from address text on the US lists and is not complete; two State Department lists carry no country or address at all and cannot be filtered by geography. A list we do not carry returns an explicit error, never an empty result. |
Maritime Open Feeds · /api/v2/maritime/* | NGA World Port Index + terrestrial AIS | US Public Domain (NGA port index) | Ports, chokepoint transits, port dwell, dark-gap detection | Continuous | Terrestrial AIS only — no satellite feed — so coverage is strongest near shore and thins in open ocean. Accrues forward from June 2026; there is no history before that date. |
China development finance Open Feeds · /api/v2/china/* | AidData Global Chinese Development Finance | ODC-By | Commitments through 2021 | On AidData release | A periodic research release, not a live feed. It ends in 2021 and will not reflect anything more recent until AidData publishes again. |
What this page does not cover
Every input above is an open or public feed — there is no licensed data supplier behind the product. What is not described here is how those inputs become the product: how we code events, resolve entities, cluster stories, and score tone. That processing is the difference between the raw feeds and the database we sell, and it stays proprietary.
Coverage figures are measured, not estimated, and we would rather publish an uncomfortable number than a vague one. If something here does not match what you observe through the API, tell us — that is a bug in the page or the pipeline, and we want to know which.