Unified cross-source entity search
High-recall fuzzy + semantic entity search across EVERY entity universe — news, GEG-Wikipedia, SEC/EDGAR, Global Energy Monitor, sanctions lists, China development finance, and Epoch AI — deduplicated into ONE result per real-world entity (keyed on the canonical spine e_ id), each with a per-source availability map and cross-source identifiers. This is a CANDIDATE LIST (not resolve-to-one): a query like Zelensky legitimately means several people. Available to any authenticated API key — search itself carries no plan flag. Your plan still governs the DETAIL behind a hit: sources you are not entitled to are redacted from the sources availability map and identifiers rather than blocking the search.
Use this to find an entity by any name/alias/acronym without knowing which source it lives in, then jump into /api/v2/entities/{entity_id} for the full profile. The q param is canonical; query, keyword, name, and search are accepted aliases.
Authorizations
GDELT Cloud API key. Send as Authorization: Bearer gdelt_sk_....
Query Parameters
Search text — a name, alias, or acronym. Fuzzy + semantic, so exact spelling is not required. Required. Aliases query, keyword, name, and search are accepted (first non-empty wins).
200Which universes to search. all (default) spans every source; news restricts to entities seen in news coverage; reference restricts to the canonical spine (SEC / GEM / sanctions / China / Epoch). registry searches the raw GLEIF Global LEI Index (3.39M records, CC0) by legal name or LEI in its own lane: hits are legal-entity REGISTRATIONS, not evidence of news coverage. Each carries resolved_in_spine (whether we also cover the entity itself) and a lei that chains to /api/v2/gleif/entities/{lei} and /api/v2/entities/{lei}/hierarchy. Registry rows never appear under all or reference.
all, news, reference, registry Optional country disambiguator, folded to one ISO-3 set through the shared resolveCohortGeoIso3 resolver (the same layer region/continent use). Accepts a country name (Germany), ISO-2 (DE), ISO-3 (DEU), or alias (comma-separated list allowed). Additive — it keeps entities carrying a matching country but never drops entities that have no country (media/GEG entities usually lack one), so it narrows a common name without gutting results. An unresolvable value now returns 400 INVALID_ENUM, consistent with the rest of the API.
"Germany"
Additive geo disambiguator — expanded to an ISO-3 set via the same resolveCohortGeoIso3 resolver as country and combinable with it. An unresolvable value returns 400 INVALID_ENUM.
Africa, Asia, Middle East, Northern Africa, Western Africa, Eastern Africa, Middle Africa, Southern Africa, Europe, Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, North America, Central America, Caribbean, South America, Oceania Additive geo disambiguator — expanded to an ISO-3 set via resolveCohortGeoIso3. An unresolvable value returns 400 INVALID_ENUM.
Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania Optional entity type filter. place covers geographies (countries, cities, regions), typed from Wikidata P31 — before 2026-07-30 these were mis-filed under organization and person, so type=organization returned countries. Roles and offices are deliberately none of these three and are excluded rather than mislabelled.
person, organization, place Number of distinct real-world entities to return (1–50). Defaults to 10.
1 <= x <= 50Response
A ranked list of distinct real-world entities. Each item carries the canonical entity id, an optional spine id, a normalized entity_type, a per-source availability map (sources), cross-source identifiers, and the universes it was matched in. Envelope: { success, query, count, data, applied_filters }.