GDELT Cloud organizes the global news stream into three structured layers. This page is a single-place reference to the categories, sub-categories, and metrics used across all three.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.gdeltcloud.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Conflict events
ACLED-style political violence, demonstrations, and strategic developments
CAMEO+ events
Ten structural domains beyond conflict
Story clusters
Daily article clusters with scope and theme tags
Three lenses
| Lens | What it captures | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Conflict events | Battles, protests, riots, explosions, violence against civilians, strategic developments. 3-level hierarchy: disorder type → event type → sub-event type. | Conflict Data · Conflict Events API |
| CAMEO+ events | Politics, crime, economy, corporate, technology, infrastructure, environment, health, demographics, information. | Event Coding · CAMEO+ Events API |
| Story clusters | A daily cluster of articles converging on a single narrative, with scope and a theme tag. | Stories endpoint (V2 API) |
Conflict events (ACLED-style)
GDELT Cloud independently codes political violence, protests, and strategic developments using the ACLED methodology. We don’t license or redistribute ACLED’s dataset — we follow their codebook on top of our own GDELT-derived clusters.Political violence
Political violence
Armed conflict, attacks, explosions, and targeted violence by armed actors.
- Battles — armed clash, government regains territory, non-state actor overtakes territory
- Explosions / Remote violence — air/drone strike, shelling, IED, suicide bomb, grenade, chemical weapon
- Violence against civilians — attack, abduction/forced disappearance, sexual violence
Demonstrations
Demonstrations
Organized protests, riots, and crowd-driven violence.
- Protests — peaceful protest, protest with intervention, excessive force against protesters
- Riots — violent demonstration, mob violence
Strategic developments
Strategic developments
Concrete actions that change the conflict landscape without combat.
- Agreement, arrests, headquarters or base established, looting/property destruction, non-violent transfer of territory, change to group/activity, disrupted weapons use, other
CAMEO+ events (10 structural domains)
CAMEO+ extends the classic CAMEO political-event taxonomy to cover structural domains that drive geopolitics, markets, and instability. Each domain has its own code prefix.| Domain | Prefix | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Political | (CAMEO root) | Diplomatic, cooperative, verbal-conflict, and non-violent coercive events |
| Crime | CR | Ordinary crime, criminal justice, policing, trafficking, gang and custody events |
| Economic | EC | Macroeconomic, monetary, fiscal, trade, capital flow, market stress |
| Corporate | CO | M&A, production, technology development, capital allocation |
| Technology | TE | AI capability, military tech, cyber, space, strategic controls |
| Infrastructure | IN | Energy, transport, supply chain, communications, water systems |
| Environment | EN | Geophysical, meteorological, climate, pollution events |
| Health | HE | Outbreaks, pandemics, vaccines, public health policy |
| Demographic | DE | Migration, refugee flows, population crises, labor events |
| Information | IF | Disinformation, info control, leaks, narrative warfare |
EC02 — MONETARY POLICY ACTION, TE03 — CYBER EVENT), the OpenAPI schemas at CAMEO+ Events API are authoritative. The Event Coding page walks through how the codes are assigned.
Metrics
Every event carries domain-aware numeric metrics so they can be ranked, routed, and used as features.| Metric | Range | Best for |
|---|---|---|
goldstein_scale | −10 to +10 | Cooperation-to-conflict spectrum (political and conflict events) |
magnitude | 0 to 10 | Domain-specific severity — economic shock, environmental hazard, capability jump |
systemic_importance | 0 to 10 | How many states / populations / sectors are materially affected |
propagation_potential | 0 to 10 | Speed and likelihood of cascading effects (highest for cyber, supply chain, info ops) |
market_sensitivity | 0 to 10 | How much the event tends to move financial markets |
Story clusters
A Story is a daily cluster of articles that converge on a single narrative. Stories are the intermediate layer between raw articles and structured Events — the same clustering output that Events are coded from.Scope levels
Each Story is tagged with one of four geographic scope bands:- Local — a single city or sub-national area, with sources rooted to that place
- National — coverage spans a single country and its national press
- Regional — a multi-country region (the Sahel, the Levant, Southeast Asia)
- International — major outlets across multiple regions are converging on the story
Theme buckets
Story categories are emitted by the clustering layer and are not a fixed enum — fresh labels can appear for novel narratives. Most stories cluster into recurring buckets:- Conflict & Security
- Diplomacy & Politics
- Economy & Markets
- Energy & Infrastructure
- Climate & Environment
- Health & Disease
- Migration & Demographics
- Technology & AI
- Information & Media
- Crime & Justice
Stories link back to the Events generated from their cluster. From a structured Conflict or CAMEO+ event, you can pivot to the underlying article-level evidence and the related stories — and from a story, fan out to all the events it produced.
Where to go next
Conflict Data deep dive
Full ACLED-style fields, actor coding, geographic precision, and edge cases
Event Coding deep dive
How CAMEO+ codes are assigned across the ten domains
V2 API Reference
Query events, stories, and entities together
MCP Tools
Use the same taxonomy through agentic MCP tools