Introduction

Introduction

Searching for Tweets is an important feature used to surface Twitter conversations about a specific topic or event. While this functionality is present in Twitter, these endpoints provide greater flexibility and power when filtering for and ingesting Tweets so you can find relevant data for your research more easily; build out near-real-time ‘listening’ applications; or generally explore, analyze, and/or act upon Tweets related to a topic of interest. 

We offer two endpoints that allow you to search for Tweets: Recent search and full-archive search. Both of these REST endpoints share a common design and features, including their use of a single search query to filter for Tweets around a specific topic. These search queries are created with a set of operators that match on Tweet and user attributes, such as message keywords, hashtags, and URLs. Operators can be combined into queries with boolean logic and parentheses to help refine the queries matching behavior. 

Both the recent search and the full-archive search endpoints provide edited Tweet metadata. All objects for Tweets created since September 29, 2022, include Tweet edit metadata, even if the Tweet was never edited. Each time a Tweet is edited, a new Tweet ID is created. A Tweet's edit history is documented by an array of Tweet IDs, starting with the original ID.

These endpoints will always return the most recent edit, along with any edit history. Any Tweet collected after its 30-minute edit window will represent its final version. To learn more about Edit Tweet metadata, check out the Edit Tweets fundamentals page.

Once you’ve set up your query and start receiving Tweets, these endpoints support navigating the results both by time and Tweet ID ranges. This is designed to support two common use cases: 

  • Get historical: Requests are for a period of interest, with no focus on the real-time nature of the data. A single request is made, and all matching data is delivered using pagination as needed. This is the default mode for Search Tweets.
  • Polling or listening: Requests are made in a "any new Tweets since my last request?" mode. Requests are made on a continual basis, and typically there is a use case focused on near real-time 'listening' for Tweets of interest.
     

Many operators and query limits are exclusive to Enterprise access, meaning that you must use keys and tokens from an App within a Project with Enterprise access to utilize the additional functionality. You can learn more about this in the endpoint sections below.

Both the recent search and the full-archive search endpoints returned Tweets contribute to the monthly Tweet cap.

Account setup

To access these endpoints, you will need:

Learn more about getting access to the Twitter API v2 endpoints in our getting started guide.

 

Recent search

The recent search endpoint allows you to programmatically access filtered public Tweets posted over the last week, and is available to all developers who have a developer account and are using keys and tokens from an App within a Project.

You can authenticate your requests with OAuth 1.0a User ContextOAuth 2.0 App-Only, or OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE. However, if you would like to receive private metrics, or a breakdown of organic and promoted metrics within your Tweet results, you will have to use OAuth 1.0a User Context or OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE, and pass user Access Tokens that are associated with the user that published the given content. 

This endpoint can deliver up to 100 Tweets per request in reverse-chronological order, and pagination tokens are provided for paging through large sets of matching Tweets. 

When using a Project with regular access, you can use the basic set of operators and can make queries up to 512 characters long. When using a Project with Enterprise access, you have access to additional operators. Projects with Enterprise Access can make queries up to 4096 characters long.

Learn more about access levels.

Full-archive search

The v2 full-archive search endpoint is only available to Projects with Pro access and Enterprise access. The endpoint allows you to programmatically access public Tweets from the complete archive dating back to the first Tweet in March 2006, based on your search query.

You can authenticate your requests to this endpoint using OAuth 2.0 App-Only, and the App Access Token must come from an App that is within a Project that has Pro or Enterprise access. Since you cannot make a request on behalf of other users (OAuth 1.0a User Context or OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE) with this endpoint, you will not be able to pull private metrics

This endpoint can deliver up to 500 Tweets per request in reverse-chronological order, and pagination tokens are provided for paging through large sets of matching Tweets.

Note: If requesting annotations through the tweet.fields parameter, the max_results parameter is currently limited to a max value of 100. This may change in the future, but please be mindful of this limitation.

Since this endpoint is only available to those that have been approved for Pro and Enterprise access, you have access to the full set of search operators and can make queries up to 1024 characters long.