Google News chooses its edition by language and region, and the address of the page carries that choice. From our server in the United States, the German edition opened in German, and the British feed returned British stories. A proxy is not needed to see another country's edition. The feed we read allows personal, non-commercial use only, and the robots.txt of news.google.com keeps crawlers to a short list of paths.
How Google News chooses what you see
Google's help page on story selection says: "Based on your language and region, algorithms pick subjects for these sections". In those sections, "people who use the same language and region get news for the same subjects." Sections such as "For you" are personalized from your settings and past activity. Local news appears in both lists.
You can pick the language and region in the settings: click Settings, then Language & region. Google adds that the setting works only for people signed in to a Google Account.
Without an account, the address carries the choice. An edition's address ends in three codes: hl for the language, gl for the country, and ceid for both. We opened news.google.com/?hl=de&gl=DE&ceid=DE:de from our server in St. Louis on 3 October 2026. Google answered with the German edition, in German, with its settings line reading "Sprache und Region Deutsch (Deutschland)". The server's American address did not change the edition.
The RSS feeds, and what they allow
Google News also serves an edition as an RSS feed. We asked for news.google.com/rss?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en from the same server. It answered with 38 stories, marked as British English, with titles from Al Jazeera and the BBC among them.
The feed carries its own terms, in its copyright line:
"This XML feed is made available solely for the purpose of rendering Google News results within a personal feed reader for personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of the feed is expressly prohibited."
| route | what it gives | what it allows |
|---|---|---|
| the edition's address | the page of any edition | reading, like any visitor. |
| the RSS feed | the stories of an edition, as XML | a personal feed reader only. |
| an official API | none that we found | nothing. |
No Google page we read documents the feeds or a Google News API.
What robots.txt and Google's terms say
The robots.txt of news.google.com starts with "Disallow: /" for every crawler it does not name. It then allows a short list: the front page and the edition addresses, /home, /nwshp, /topics/, /publications/, /stories/, /swg/ and /about. Neither /rss nor /search is on the list. A separate group shuts out GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, CCBot, ClaudeBot and other AI crawlers entirely.
The Google Terms of Service list "using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages" as abuse. Taken with the feed's own line, neither the feed nor Google News search is open to collection. Its robots.txt leaves crawlers only the short list of pages above.
Where a proxy fits
For Google News, it does not fit. The address chooses the edition, and both the German edition and the British feed loaded from our server in the United States. A proxy would only help to collect the feed or search pages at scale, which the feed terms and robots.txt rule out.
We did not test the Local news section, which Google partly personalizes. If you want to see how Google ranks local results in another city, our Google local results page covers the one check by hand where a city proxy fits. Our pages on Google Images and Google reviews cover Google's other official routes.
For other work where a proxy is allowed, start with what a residential proxy is. Our free proxy list and proxy checker cost nothing. Residential traffic starts at $0.44/GB, and every plan is on our pricing page.
The limits of this page
We sent two plain requests from one server, without a browser or an account. We did not test other editions, a signed-in account or the Local news section. Google documents the hl, gl and ceid codes in no page we read; we saw them work, once. The feed's copyright line is the only text we found that sets terms for the feeds. This page is due for a check by 3 January 2027.
Sources
Every Google page below was read on 3 October 2026, from our server in St. Louis.
- Google News Help, Check or change your Google News settings.
- Google News Help, How Google News stories are selected.
- Google, the robots.txt file of news.google.com.
- Google, Terms of Service, effective 30 July 2026.
- Our two requests from our server in St. Louis on 3 October 2026: the German edition and the British RSS feed of Google News.
