Stack Overflow question views, score & answers from a URL — free API

Stack Overflow API

Get a Stack Overflow question's views, score, and answer count from its URL

Hand Pulse a stackoverflow.com/questions/… URL and get the question's view count, score, answer count, title, and date back as clean JSON — one GET request, no key, no signup. The same call shape works for Hacker News and every other platform Pulse supports.

One request

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/metrics?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F11227809%2Fwhy-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array"

returns live numbers from that question's public page:

{
  "platform": "stackoverflow",
  "title": "Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?",
  "views": 1987340,
  "likes": 27537,      // question score (net upvotes)
  "comments": 26,      // answer count
  "publishedAt": "2012-06-27T13:51:36.000Z"
}

Pulse normalizes every platform to the same fields, so a Stack Overflow question's score lands in likes, its view count in views, and its answer count in comments — the closest cross-platform equivalents. That's a deliberate trade: you get one response shape across every site instead of one bespoke schema per API.

Where the data comes from

Stack Overflow already publishes a generous official Stack Exchange API, and Pulse uses it under the hood for Stack Overflow questions. Pulse's value isn't replacing it — it's that the same request returns the same normalized shape for Hacker News, YouTube, X, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon, and more. If you're tracking how a link is doing across the places it was shared, you call one endpoint instead of learning each site's response format.

Hacker News, same call

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/metrics?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D8863"

A Hacker News story returns its points and comment count the same way — see the Hacker News guide. Both are common surfaces for a developer launch, so you can watch a "Show HN" thread and its Stack Overflow follow-ups with the same two lines of code.

Track a question's climb

Hit /history with the same URL and Pulse records a timestamped series, so you can watch a question's views and score rise over time:

curl "https://pulse.walls.sh/history?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F11227809%2Fwhy-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array"

See tracking a post's growth curve for the full pattern, or drop a live badge in your README.

Free

No signup, no key. For commercial use or volume, Pro is $19/mo — see pricing. Full API docs.

More: Hacker News metrics · all platforms, one API · for AI agents.