Monitoring nearly the entire world's news media is only the beginning - even the largest team of humans could not begin to read and analyze the billions upon billions of words and images published each day. GDELT uses some of the world's most sophisticated computer algorithms, custom-designed for global news media, running on "one of the most powerful server networks in the known Universe", together with some of the world's most powerful deep learning algorithms, to create a realtime computable record of global society that can be visualized, analyzed, modeled, examined and even forecasted. A huge array of datasets totaling trillions of datapoints are available. Three primary data streams are created, one codifying physical activities around the world in over 300 categories, one recording the people, places, organizations, millions of themes and thousands of emotions underlying those events and their interconnections and one codifying the visual narratives of the world's news imagery.

All three streams update every 15 minutes, offering near-realtime insights into the world around us. Underlying the streams are a vast array of sources, from hundreds of thousands of global media outlets to special collections like 215 years of digitized books, 21 billion words of academic literature spanning 70 years, human rights archives and even saturation processing of the raw closed captioning stream of almost 100 television stations across the US in collaboration with the Internet Archive's Television News Archive. Finally, also in collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Archive captures nearly all worldwide online news coverage monitored by GDELT each day into its permanent archive to ensure its availability for future generations even in the face of repressive forces that continue to erode press freedoms around the world.