[NewSearch millions of jobs from your AI agent with MCP→](/blog/jobspipe-mcp-server) [All posts](/blog) Guide·Jul 24, 2026·7 min read # Indeed API key: why there isn't one, and what to use instead The Indeed publisher key stopped working in 2023 and was never replaced with a self-serve equivalent. How to recognise the tutorials that predate the shutdown, what credentials Indeed issues today and to whom, and the working path if your goal is reading Indeed job postings. ![Dvir Atias](/authors/dvir-atias.jpg) Dvir Atias Founder, JobsPipe There is no self-serve Indeed API key. Not a paid one, not a rate-limited free one, not one behind a waitlist. The key you are looking for stopped existing in 2023, and most of the tutorials explaining how to get it were written before that and never updated. This post covers what the old key was, how to recognise a walkthrough that predates the shutdown, what credentials Indeed issues today, and what to use instead if your actual goal is reading Indeed job postings. ## The short answer Indeed shut down the Publisher API in 2023 and never replaced it with a self-serve equivalent. The APIs Indeed ships today are employer-side and partner-gated: credentials are issued after approval into a partner program, not after a signup form. None of them returns job postings, so even a successful approval would not give you the endpoint most people want the key for. If your goal is to read Indeed job postings programmatically, the working equivalent is a key for an API that indexes Indeed’s public listings. ## What the Indeed publisher key used to be The Publisher API was Indeed’s public XML feed for affiliates. You registered at publisher.indeed.com, received a numeric publisher ID, and passed it as a query parameter to a search endpoint that returned jobs as XML. It was free, it required no approval, and for roughly a decade it was the default answer to “how do I get jobs data.” Indeed retired it in favour of a hosted-search widget, which is iframe-only and returns rendered HTML rather than data, plus a separate enterprise data partnership. Existing keys stopped working. There was no migration path for data consumers, because data consumers were the use case being removed. ## How to spot a tutorial that predates the shutdown A large share of the pages ranking for this query are stale. Three reliable tells: - It sends you to `publisher.indeed.com` to register for a key. That page no longer issues data credentials. - It shows a request against `api.indeed.com/ads/apisearch` or any endpoint taking a `publisher=` parameter. That is the retired Publisher API. - It parses an XML response. Nothing Indeed ships today returns XML to a self-serve caller. If a walkthrough contains any of those, the code in it has not run successfully in years, whatever the publish date on the page says. ## What credentials Indeed issues today Approved partners receive OAuth client credentials rather than a static API key, and those unlock employer-side surfaces only: the Job Sync API for publishing an ATS’s jobs into Indeed, Indeed Apply for delivering applications back into a partner ATS, the Disposition Sync API for reporting candidate outcomes, and the Sponsored Jobs API for campaign management. Approval is sales-led and scoped to a use case Indeed wants to exist. “We want to read job postings” is not one of them. The full surface breakdown is in the [Indeed API guide](/blog/indeed-api-guide), and what each surface costs is in [Indeed API pricing](/blog/indeed-api-pricing). ## If you are an ATS or an employer Your path is real and it is the partner program. Apply through Indeed’s partner channel with your integration described in terms of what it publishes into Indeed rather than what it reads out. Expect a commercial conversation and a review cycle measured in weeks or months. Worth setting expectations internally before you start: a signed partnership grants publishing and application-delivery credentials. It does not turn into a jobs search endpoint later. ## If you want to read Indeed postings Skip the key hunt. Indeed job postings are public web pages, and the practical options are scraping them yourself, buying from a scraping marketplace, or using a jobs API that indexes them for you. We ran the first of those in production and shut it down, for reasons documented in [Indeed scraper vs Indeed API](/blog/indeed-scraper-vs-api). A JobsPipe key is self-serve and takes about thirty seconds. Indeed is one source among 30+ behind the same schema: ``` curl https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer jp_live_your_key_here" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "source_or": ["indeed"], "job_title_or": ["data engineer"], "job_country_code_or": ["US"], "posted_at_max_age_days": 7 }' ``` The response carries a normalized `title`, `company`, `location`, a parsed `compensation` object, a stable `id` that survives re-crawls, and an `apply_url` pointing back at the original listing. Get a working key in 30 seconds - free tier, no partner program. ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I get an Indeed API key? You cannot get one self-serve. Indeed shut down the Publisher API in 2023, which was the last surface that issued keys on registration, and never replaced it with a self-serve equivalent. Today Indeed issues OAuth client credentials only to companies approved into its partner program, through a sales-led review. Any tutorial that walks you through registering at publisher.indeed.com for a key predates the shutdown. ### Does Indeed have an API key for developers? No. There is no developer key, free or paid, that grants access to Indeed job-postings data. Approved partners receive OAuth client credentials scoped to employer-side surfaces: publishing jobs into Indeed, delivering applications back to an ATS, and reporting candidate outcomes. None of those endpoints returns job search results, so even an approved credential does not do what most people want a key for. ### Does Indeed have a public or open API? Not for reading jobs. Indeed's public API era ended with the Publisher API shutdown in 2023. What remains is a partner program with a private application process, plus an enterprise data licensing program that is NDA-gated. Neither is open in the sense of self-serve registration, and neither exposes a jobs-search endpoint to data consumers. ### What happened to the Indeed Publisher API key? Indeed retired the Publisher API in 2023 and existing keys stopped working. It had been a free public XML feed for affiliates: you registered, received a numeric publisher ID, and passed it as a query parameter to a search endpoint. Indeed replaced it with an iframe-only hosted search widget that returns rendered HTML rather than data, and a separate enterprise data partnership. There was no migration path for data consumers. ### Does Indeed have an API for employers? Yes, and that is the only side Indeed serves programmatically. Employers and their ATS vendors can use the Job Sync API to publish jobs into Indeed, Indeed Apply to receive applications, the Disposition Sync API to report outcomes, and the Sponsored Jobs API to manage campaigns. All four require partner approval, and all four move data toward Indeed rather than out of it. ### How do I read Indeed job postings without an API key? Use an API that indexes Indeed's public listings, or scrape the listings yourself and accept the proxy spend, parser maintenance, and terms-of-service exposure that come with it. Indeed job postings are public web pages, so the data is reachable; what does not exist is a first-party endpoint that hands it to you. A JobsPipe key is self-serve and covers Indeed alongside 30+ other sources under one schema. [ ← Previous Indeed API pricing: what it costs, and what's actually free ](/blog/indeed-api-pricing)[ Next → Unified API platforms: the two kinds, and which one job data needs ](/blog/unified-api-job-data) --- Canonical URL: https://jobspipe.dev/blog/indeed-api-key Title: Indeed API key: why there isn't one, and what to use instead Description: The Indeed publisher key stopped working in 2023 and was never replaced with a self-serve equivalent. How to recognise the tutorials that predate the shutdown, what credentials Indeed issues today and to whom, and the working path if your goal is reading Indeed job postings.