How should failed or empty collections be handled?

Inspect per-target failedRuns and each successful run identity. Empty sources or null fields are valid output; a missing failed run is not an empty successful answer. A completed job can contain failed collections.

Collected data

Google News: position

Per-run positions in Google search modules and news articles.

Collection target: google_news. Field availability depends on the provider output shown below.

Understand the collected data

Google search results, shopping and People Also Ask use module-specific position values. Google News articles have position values within their returned lists. Chatbot sources contain title and url, without a position field.

Collected data

A position belongs to its provider module and run. Do not treat array order as an API ranking guarantee or compare different modules as one ranking. Averages such as avg_position are customer-built analysis.

The google_news target returns googleNews.results and googleNews.topNews. Article fields include title, url, snippet, publisher, position and publishedAt. Publication labels are provider text, such as 2 hours ago, not normalized timestamps. News collections can contain empty lists. Google Search and Google News share a task when requested together, while each target has its own outputs and failedRuns count.

Provider output examples

These are illustrative successful run excerpts, not full result files or calculated metrics. Submit POST /v1/crawl-jobs, track completion, then download the authenticated result. Outputs depend on the target; a chatbot has no news articles or Google position fields.

{
  "runNumber": 1,
  "runTaskId": "53b39f0d-9576-44d6-a796-45dbfbfcdbf3",
  "status": "completed",
  "capturedAt": "2026-10-09T10:01:00.000Z",
  "pageUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q=example&tbm=nws",
  "googleNews": {
    "results": [
      {
        "position": 1,
        "publishedAt": "2 hours ago",
        "publisher": "Example Publisher",
        "snippet": "Illustrative article summary.",
        "title": "Illustrative article title",
        "url": "https://example.com/article"
      }
    ],
    "topNews": []
  }
}

Illustrative provider output. Empty lists and null fields are valid; inspect failedRuns in the result file.

Full result format and failed-run handling →

Position FAQ

Does the API calculate position?: Google search results, shopping and People Also Ask use module-specific position values. Google News articles have position values within their returned lists. Chatbot sources contain title and url, without a position field.
How should failed or empty collections be handled?: Inspect per-target failedRuns and each successful run identity. Empty sources or null fields are valid output; a missing failed run is not an empty successful answer. A completed job can contain failed collections.

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