Free EU tender alerts with the official TED API (Python, no scraping)

Emir Mrkaljević — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 01:56:56 +0000

Every public tender above the EU thresholds is published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), and TED has an official, free search API. Paid alert services charge hundreds of euros a year for what is essentially a saved query. Here's the DIY version.

The query

TED's search API (https://docs.ted.europa.eu/api/latest/search.html) takes an "expert query", e.g. IT services (CPV 72000000) from German or Austrian buyers published today:

import requests, datetime
q = "classification-cpv IN (72000000) AND buyer-country IN (DEU AUT) AND publication-date=" + datetime.date.today().strftime("%Y%m%d")
r = requests.post("https://api.ted.europa.eu/v3/notices/search", json={
    "query": q, "fields": ["publication-number", "notice-title", "buyer-name", "deadline-receipt-tender-date-lot"], "limit": 100})
for n in r.json()["notices"]:
    print(n["publication-number"], n.get("notice-title"))

Turning it into alerts

Store the publication numbers you've already sent (a small JSON file or a sheet).
Run the script daily (cron, GitHub Actions) and send only new notices to email/Slack.
Link each notice as https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/<publication-number>.

Gotchas

Field names are multilingual objects; pick your language and fall back to the original.
Values and winners live in different fields for contract notices vs award notices.
Paging: use the iterationNextToken/page parameters, and keep queries narrow.

TED data is EU open data and can be reused, including commercially, with attribution.

Disclosure: I maintain a hosted version, TED Tenders Scraper on Apify, that flattens all of this into one row per notice with an "only new" alert mode ($2.50 per 1,000 notices). The snippet above is enough for a single saved search. If you'd rather get a ready Excel every Monday with all open IT tenders across Europe (English titles included), I also publish EU IT Tenders & Grants Weekly.

How to find broken links and redirects hiding in your XML sitemap (with Python)

Emir Mrkaljević — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:41:54 +0000

Google expects your sitemap to list only live, canonical URLs. After a migration or a product cleanup, sitemaps quietly fill up with 404s and 301s, and Search Console starts complaining. Here's how to audit one in ~40 lines of Python.

1. Find the sitemaps

Start with robots.txt - most sites list their sitemaps there:

import re, requests
def sitemaps_from_robots(origin):
    txt = requests.get(f"{origin}/robots.txt", timeout=20).text
    found = re.findall(r"(?im)^\s*sitemap:\s*(\S+)", txt)
    return found or [f"{origin}/sitemap.xml"]

2. Walk sitemap indexes and collect URLs

import gzip, xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
NS = {"s": "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"}
def urls_from_sitemap(url, depth=0):
    body = requests.get(url, timeout=30).content
    if url.endswith(".gz"): body = gzip.decompress(body)
    root = ET.fromstring(body)
    if root.tag.endswith("sitemapindex") and depth < 5:
        for loc in root.findall("s:sitemap/s:loc", NS):
            yield from urls_from_sitemap(loc.text.strip(), depth + 1)
    else:
        for u in root.findall("s:url", NS):
            yield u.findtext("s:loc", namespaces=NS).strip(), u.findtext("s:lastmod", namespaces=NS)

3. Check every URL politely

def check(url):
    r = requests.head(url, allow_redirects=False, timeout=20)
    if r.status_code in (405, 501):  # some servers don't support HEAD
        r = requests.get(url, allow_redirects=False, timeout=20, stream=True)
    return r.status_code, r.headers.get("location")

Keep concurrency low (2-3 requests at a time per site), respect robots.txt disallow rules, and write rows with status >= 400 or a location header to a CSV. Those are the entries to fix or remove.

Edge cases you'll hit

Sitemap indexes nested several levels deep, .xml.gz files, and plain-text sitemaps.
robots.txt that returns an HTML error page with status 200.
Servers that answer HEAD with 404/405 but GET with 200.
Huge sitemaps (50k URLs/50 MB per file) - stream or cap them.

If you don't want to maintain it

Disclosure: I built a hosted version of exactly this, Sitemap Scraper on Apify, which handles the edge cases above, runs many sites at once and exports to CSV/Sheets ($0.20 per 1,000 URLs, $0.50 per 1,000 status checks). The script above works fine for one site too.

DEV Community: Emir Mrkaljević