Google Search Console API Gains Discover & Google News Data With Regex Support

Oct 26, 2021 • 7:51 am | comments

(0) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

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Google added to the Search Console Search Analytics API Discover and Google News data that it added to the web interface earlier this year. Google also added support for Regex with the query and page dimensions.

As a reminder, in January Google Search Console added a news performance report and in 2019 Google added Discover reports to Search Console and gained more data in February. But SEOS wanted the data in the API. Also, in April Google added Regex support to the web interface.

These are now all available in the Search Analytics API. Google said the searchType parameter, which previously enabled you to filter API calls by news, video, image, and web, will be renamed to type and will support two additional parameters: discover (for Google Discover) and googleNews (for Google News). Please note that while we renamed the parameter to type, we’re still supporting the old name searchType.

In the Search Console Performance reports, some metrics and dimensions are compatible only with some data types; for example, queries and positions are not supported by the Google Discover report. In the same way, if an unsupported dimension is requested, the API will return an error message.

Plus, with the new Regex support in the API, you can use it for query and page dimensions. Two new operators were added to the existing match operations and are includingRegex and excludingRegex.

So this news ended up causing a lot of confusion because not everything was fully live when it was announced:

Update: the rollout process is taking longer than expected, but we're working on it. We'll update again here once the rollout is complete. Sorry for the inconvenience!
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 25, 2021