Google News is the world’s largest free RSS source: every story indexed by Google News is also exposed as an RSS feed, with full query support, freshness filters, and country/language scoping. Combined with AI Content Generator’s Live News Mode, this becomes a complete pipeline: Google News surfaces what just happened in your niche, the plugin fetches the items, the AI provider rewrites each one as a fresh summary with editorial commentary, and the post lands on your WordPress site automatically — with the source cited inline.
This tutorial walks through the exact setup: constructing the right Google News RSS URL with operators that filter what you want, plugging it into a Live News Mode campaign, configuring the rewrite rules so the output isn’t a plagiarised copy of the source, and the publishing and dedup rules that keep the site SEO-clean and avoid duplicate content penalties.
By the end you’ll have a campaign producing 10–20 short news posts per day pulled from Google News in your niche, each rewritten in your voice with a credited source link, at a cost around $10/month in API calls. The architecture is repeatable for every niche where Google News has coverage — which is essentially every English-language vertical.
How Google News RSS actually works
The endpoint is https://news.google.com/rss/search and it accepts a small set of query parameters that determine what comes out. q is the search query (supports operators: AND, OR, NOT, quotes, parentheses). hl is the host language (en, it, es, fr). gl is the geographic location (US, GB, IT, etc.). ceid is the combined country:language identifier (US:en, IT:it, GB:en).
You can also add freshness filters directly in the query string. when:1d restricts to the last 24 hours, when:1h to the last hour, when:7d to the last week. These are unofficial but stable Google News operators that significantly improve signal quality — you almost always want when:1d for a news-style automation, so the queue stays fresh.
Step 1 — Open the URL builder inside the campaign
Create a new campaign and enable Live News Mode (or open an existing news campaign). AI Content Generator includes a built-in Google News RSS source builder that constructs the URL for you. You don’t have to remember the parameters — fill the form, copy the result, and add it as a source.
Step 2 — Write a precise query
The single biggest factor in the quality of an automated Google News campaign is the precision of the query. Three rules:
- Use phrase quotes around the main keyword.
"WordPress"returns only items that contain that exact word. Without quotes, Google News applies stemming and synonyms (you’ll get “WordCamp”, “wordsmith” matches). - Combine with AND/OR groups for niche depth.
"WordPress" AND ("plugin" OR "theme")filters down to plugin and theme news."AI" AND "WordPress" AND NOT "shopify"excludes off-topic results. - Add the freshness operator at the end. Append
when:1dorwhen:7dto the query string for time filtering.
Test the query in a regular browser first by pasting it into news.google.com and previewing the results. If the first 20 results look like what you want to publish, the query is good. If 30% are off-topic, tighten the operators before plugging the URL into AI Content Generator.
Step 3 — Pick country and language carefully
Google News indexes thousands of regional editions. The gl and hl parameters determine which edition you’re reading from. US:en gives you the US English edition, which is the largest English-language corpus and the safe default. GB:en for UK-specific stories. IT:it for Italian-language news. FR:fr for French.
If you want a single campaign that covers multiple regions, create separate sources — one URL per country — and add them all to the same Live News Mode campaign. Dedup catches the overlapping international stories; the rest produces broader coverage than any single edition.
Step 4 — Configure per-item rewrite rules
The rewrite rules panel controls how the AI transforms each Google News item into a WordPress post. Two key fields:
- Title rewrite mode — Rephrase keeping core entities is the right default. The plugin asks the AI to rewrite the headline but keep proper nouns, version numbers and dates intact. Avoid Verbatim (duplicate-content risk) and Fully creative (loses the news connection).
- Body rewrite mode — Summary + editorial commentary produces a short news brief plus a paragraph of your editorial stance. Pure summary is fine for high-volume neutral sites. Deep rewrite with extra context produces longer pieces but doubles the token cost.
Set the Target length per post to 400–600 words for news. Set Citation format to Inline link to source: the plugin inserts a link to the original article inside the first paragraph, in the style “according to TechCrunch’s report”. This is the ethical baseline and a clear E-E-A-T signal.
Step 5 — Skip unwanted sources
Google News mixes high-quality and low-quality outlets in its search results. The Skip if source is field accepts a comma-separated list of domains the plugin should ignore. Add competitors you don’t want to amplify, paywalled outlets you can’t read past the lead paragraph, and any source whose editorial line conflicts with your site’s stance.
Conversely, the Boost if source is field (in the advanced panel) lets you prioritise specific outlets. Items from boosted sources jump to the front of the queue when there’s contention. Use it sparingly — boosting too many sources defeats the point and creates an effective allowlist.
Step 6 — Mind the duplicate content rules
Google penalises sites that publish content too similar to existing pages. AI Content Generator includes three guards that together keep you safe. Lexical similarity check: after the AI rewrites the body, the plugin compares it against the source text; if more than 30% of phrases match verbatim, the article is re-generated with a stricter prompt. Cross-source dedup: the plugin hashes each title and skips re-publishing the same story from a different source within the dedup window. Canonical hint: the plugin sets a rel="canonical" on its own URL but adds a clear “Source: ” line that points to the original, so Google understands the relationship.
Leave all three on. Disabling them in pursuit of higher publishing volume is the fastest way to a manual action notification in Search Console.
Step 7 — Set the daily cap and cost budget
The cadence panel from the Live News Mode tutorial applies here too. For Google News specifically, 15 posts per day per campaign is a sensible ceiling. The source health panel shows you the actual ratio: items pulled vs items unique after dedup vs items published. If you’re consistently pulling 200 items and only publishing 15, the campaign is healthy and selective. If you’re pulling 50 and publishing 15, you’re at saturation and need a broader query.
The cost preview on the right of the panel computes the daily and monthly estimate based on your model choice. For Gemini 2.0 Flash at 15 posts/day × 400-600 words, you should see ≈ $10 per month. If you’re seeing more, switch from a heavyweight model to a Flash/Mini variant for the news rewrites — the difference in quality on short summaries is negligible.
Step 8 — Run a test fetch, inspect, refine
Click Run news fetch now. The plugin pulls the latest items from your Google News URL, dedups against the last 7 days, and rewrites a small batch (3 by default) for inspection. Read them as drafts: does the rewrite preserve the news? Is the source cited cleanly? Is your editorial paragraph adding something the original didn’t?
Common iterations after the first test: tighten the query (too many off-topic items), refine the summary prompt (rewrites are too generic), lower the target word count (Google News stories are short, 800-word summaries feel padded), add a source to the skip list.
Troubleshooting common issues
- Empty feed — your query is too narrow, or Google News doesn’t have coverage in the chosen edition. Broaden the query or switch
glto US:en. - Same story published with three different titles — dedup is firing on title hash, but the AI is rewriting titles enough to slip past. Raise the dedup window to 14 days and enable cross-source lexical dedup.
- Posts look too similar to the original — lower the lexical similarity threshold from 30% to 20%. The plugin will reject more rewrites and force the AI to be more original.
- Google Search Console flags duplicate content — verify the canonical tag is firing on your posts and the “Source: ” citation is present. If both are correct, lower your daily cap and audit a sample of posts manually.
- Sudden drop in items fetched — Google News occasionally rotates URL parameters. The plugin auto-retries with alternative formats; check the Logs for “google_news_format_changed” entries.
You’re done
That’s the full pipeline: a precise Google News query with AND/OR/NOT operators and a freshness filter, plugged into a Live News Mode campaign, rewritten with the “rephrase + summary + editorial” template, capped at 15 posts/day, deduped against the last 7 days, with the source cited inline on every post.
From here you can add Bing News as a parallel source (similar URL format, complementary story selection — covered in another tutorial), layer multiple Google News editions for broader coverage, or clone the campaign for a different niche by changing only the query string. The architecture is repeatable and the marginal cost of a second automated news site is essentially the API budget — fifteen minutes of weekly maintenance keep both running indefinitely.