We are making some changes to Overton’s API. These will be coming into effect on the 14th July 2025.
What is changing?
Previously, the API response JSON on the documents and articles endpoints would include facet data by default. Over time, as our dataset has grown, this has become a significant response time reducer due to the high compute requirements to gather this data, which many uses of the API do not actually require. To help serve users of the API as efficiently as possible, we will be removing this data from default API responses from the 14th July 2025
This means that by default, the “facets” key of the JSON response will be an empty array, rather than populated with buckets of key value pairs representing facet options and their document counts.
However, if this facet data is necessary for your analysis, there are two ways you will be able to access the data as it was before:
- A new query string parameter will be made available on these API endpoints: “show_search_facets=true”, which when passed to the API via the url you call will return the facet data to the response JSON
- If you are unable to update your workflows with this new query string parameter, you can contact us to let us know, and we will configure your account to maintain the current functionality.
If you have any questions, please contact our support team at support@overton.io.