How to Integrate Economic Data into Your AI (Complete 2025 Guide)

TL;DR

• Valyu’s Search API lets you access economic indicators like GDP, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates in just 3 lines of code.
• Structured results from authoritative sources like the World Bank, BLS, and FRED, updated continuously and ready for AI-native use.
• It works out of the box with LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, or LlamaIndex.

Why Economic Data Matters for AI Builders

Economic data is the foundation for:

• Macroeconomic models
• Research copilots for analysts and policy teams
• Fintech tools and forecasting agents
• Automated dashboards and financial planning apps

But structured economic data is fragmented across thousands of tables, APIs, PDFs, and versioned government portals. Integrating it manually is painful and error-prone - especially when the accuracy of a single number can break an entire reasoning chain.

The Problem With Traditional Access

• Fragmented sources (World Bank, FRED, BLS, etc.)
• Inconsistent naming & units across time-series and countries
• Slow updates, buried revisions, unclear release versions
• No semantic search - just raw metadata or table views
• No context for AI agents or LLM pipelines

The cost of getting it wrong isn’t visible until it’s too late flawed citations, invalid prompts, broken agent logic can ruin down stream tasks.

The Fast Way: Use Valyu’s Economic Data API

Valyu provides one interface to search across global, domestic, and monetary data delivering structured, citation-ready results with zero preprocessing required.

3-Line Setup

1import { Valyu } from 'valyu-js';
2
3const valyu = new Valyu({ apiKey: 'your-valyu-api-key' });
4
5const response = await valyu.search(
6  "What was US inflation in July 2023?"
7);
8
9console.log(response);
Copy

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Explore economic data docs

Example Use Cases

Macro Research Agent
“Summarize GDP trends for Sub-Saharan Africa since 2015.”

Inflation Dashboard Copilot
“Show monthly CPI for the US and UK over the last 6 months.”

Policy Assistant
“What was the federal funds rate in Q2 2022?”

Labor Market Explorer
“Pull the latest unemployment rate by US state.”

Benchmark: Valyu vs Alternatives

Economic evaluation: Valyu scored 73%, Parallel 52%, Exa 45%, and Google 43% on queries spanning GDP, inflation, and employment data.

Valyu is the first system to reliably retrieve structured economics data across global and domestic sources even when indicators are deeply nested, versioned, or ambiguously labeled.
For details on how we evaluate performance, see our Economics Benchmark blog or browse the public benchmarks on GitHub.

Advanced Usage Example: Filter by Source, Time, Region

1const response = await valyu.search(
2  "Monthly unemployment rate in California from Jan to July 2023",
3  {
4    included_sources: ["valyu/valyu-bls"],
5    max_num_results: 5
6  }
7);
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💡 Use included_sources to target specific datasets like valyu/valyu-bls, valyu/valyu-fred, or valyu/valyu-worldbank.

Search for indicators like GDP, inflation, interest rates, and employment by region or time range. Output is structured, filtered, and RAG-ready for use in your AI application.

Best Practices for Economic Data in AI

• Be specific: include country, region, unit, and date
• Use date_range or start_date/end_date for time-series
• Pre-index common indicators for faster response time
• Validate context windows before injecting full time-series into LLMs
• Add “seasonally adjusted” or “real/nominal” if ambiguity is possible

FAQ (Schema-Enabled)

Q: What sources are supported?
A: World Bank, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), FRED (Federal Reserve), and more coming soon.

Q: How fresh is the data?
A: Updates are pulled continuously as soon as they’re published, typically within 1–2 hours of source updates.

Q: Can I search by region, frequency, or adjustment?
A: Yes; use natural language queries or config filters to narrow by date, geography, or adjustment type.

Q: What formats are returned?
A: Clean JSON with structured metadata, including value, date, unit, indicator name, source, and citation string.

Add Real Economic Reasoning to Your AI Stack

When accuracy matters, structure matters. Valyu helps your AI systems reason from the real economy and not scraped guesses or broken links.

Get your API key
Read the economics docs
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