API and MCP · Current Zeitgeist

The site's data, read-only, for your own code and AI assistants: what each country pays attention to, industries, issues in the news, the scorecard and reader polls.

Keys

The API and MCP come with Pro (1,000 calls a month) and Business (20,000 calls a month, or more by agreement). Make a key on your API keys page: it is shown once, so copy it then. You can have up to 3 at a time and revoke any of them. Keep keys out of web pages and public code.

Send the key in the Authorization header of every request:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer cz_YOUR_KEY" https://currentzeitgeist.com/api/v1/countries/JP

Limits

Every request counts as one call, including ones that fail. The count resets on the 1st of each month (UTC); your API keys page shows it.
Up to 120 requests a minute per key.
Dates go back up to 400 days from the newest day. Data is updated once a day.

Endpoints

All are GET under https://currentzeitgeist.com/api/v1 and answer JSON. date is optional everywhere (YYYY-MM-DD; default: the newest day).

Path	What it gives
`/countries`	The countries with a page that day: code, name, coverage (`full` or `limited`). Takes `date`.
`/countries/{cc}`	A country's top 25 topics, how much of its news is about each issue against usual, and its economic numbers. `cc` is a two-letter code, e.g. `JP`. Takes `date`.
`/industries/{id}`	With `country`: the industry's topics there, its share of that country's news and its numbers. Without: the countries where it has topics and the topics several countries share. Takes `country` and `date`.
`/issues/{id}`	An issue's share of the world's news, where it is covered most, and where it is covered more than usual. Takes `date`.
`/scorecard`	How often topics labelled rising were still in their country's top 100 one, four and twelve weeks later, next to all topics.
`/pulse/{poll}`	A reader poll's results over the last 3 months.

Fields

Topics: rank, name (English), local_name, category, trend (new, breakout, rising, sustained,re-entry, falling or null), rising_today, wikidata (a Wikidata id, or null), industries, content_flags (e.g. violence, explicit).
News: per issue, share_pct of the country's news that day and usual_pct over its past 4 weeks; surging when well above usual. News coverage, not public opinion.
Numbers: name, value, unit, period, source, licence, url, and a note when a source asks for one to be shown. Only from sources whose terms let us pass them on.
Every answer lists its attribution: credit these when you use or show the data.

Ids

Issues: ai, cost-of-living, climate, immigration, democracy-elections (Democracy and elections), jobs-work (Jobs and work), health, war-security (War and security).

Industries: agriculture, food-beverage, hospitality-restaurants, travel-tourism, retail-ecommerce, fashion-beauty, manufacturing, media-entertainment, gaming, music, sports-fitness, advertising-marketing, tech-software, ai, telecom, finance-banking, crypto, insurance, real-estate-construction, energy-utilities, automotive-mobility, transport-logistics, health-pharma, education, science-research, government-public, security-defence, legal-professional, hr-staffing, nonprofit.

Polls: worry:{issue}, spend:{01–13} (spending groups, e.g. spend:01 for food), outlook:{industry}, aware:{Wikidata id}. Results come from readers who chose to answer, not a representative sample; a world total shows from 30 answers and a country from 100.

Errors

Errors answer {"error": "code"} with these codes:

Status	Code	Meaning
401	`invalid_key`	No key, a wrong key, or a revoked one.
403	`plan_required`	Your plan doesn't include the API or MCP.
429	`rate_limited`	Too many requests in a minute. Wait, then retry.
429	`quota_exceeded`	This month's calls are used up. They reset on the 1st (UTC).
400	`bad_arguments`	An unknown parameter, or one with the wrong type.
400	`bad_date`	Not a date in YYYY-MM-DD form.
400	`date_out_of_range`	After the newest day, or more than 400 days before it.
400	`bad_country`	Not a two-letter country code.
400	`unknown_industry`	Not one of the industry ids below.
400	`unknown_issue`	Not one of the issue ids below.
400	`unknown_poll`	Not a poll the site asks.
404	`no_data`	No page for that country, industry or day.
503	`unavailable`	Data is briefly unavailable. Retry later.

AI agents (MCP)

The same data as tools for AI assistants, over the Model Context Protocol: https://currentzeitgeist.com/mcp (HTTP, with your key as a bearer token). The tools are list_countries,country_today, industry, issue, scorecard and pulse; all are read-only, and each tool call counts as one call.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http current-zeitgeist https://currentzeitgeist.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer cz_YOUR_KEY"

Other clients that take a JSON config with headers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "current-zeitgeist": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://currentzeitgeist.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer cz_YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Using the answers

Names in answers are titles of topics from public sources, given as data: if your software passes them to an AI model, treat them as data, not as instructions. Credit the sources each answer lists. Don't resell or republish the data in bulk, or use it to train AI models, without an agreement. The full rules are in the terms.

Questions, or need more calls? Write to data@currentzeitgeist.com.