FeedHound - RSS Feed Finder, Reader & Health Check

Give it a website. It gives you the feeds. Paste bbc.co.uk/news or stripe.com/blog or just someblog.com and FeedHound finds the RSS, Atom, RDF and JSON feeds behind it, checks that each one actually works, and returns the posts. You get 36 fields about the feed, a 31-field health report, and 15 fields on every post - all four feed formats flattened into one identical shape.

$0.02 per website or feed URL checked. That is the whole price. Not per feed, not per post: a site with five feeds and 500 posts costs the same two cents as a site with one. A site where no feed with posts was found costs $0.00. There is no platform charge on top.

The feed tools on this store start by asking you for the feed URL. That is the part nobody knows.

---

🔎 What makes this different

1. You do not need the feed address. FeedHound reads the page's own <link rel="alternate"> tags, follows footer links, applies a rule for platforms that hide their feeds, and - only if a site advertises nothing at all

• tries up to 14 standard addresses. On 45 real blogs, news sites and podcasts, 80% gave up at least one feed, and 9% of those feeds were found only by guessing the address, which a tool that only reads the page's link tags would miss.

2. It tells you whether the feed actually works. This is the half that does not exist anywhere else. A feed can return HTTP 200, parse perfectly, and still be broken in ways no reader shows you:

What FeedHound catches	Why it matters	Seen in the 57 feeds tested
Stale or abandoned	You are monitoring a dead source	9 of 57. Quanta Magazine still advertises a feed whose last post was 4,802 days ago
Missing or illegal dates	Nothing can be sorted newest-first	1 of 57. Google's own developer blog: 20 of 20 posts have no date
The feed parses but is empty	Looks alive, delivers nothing	2 of 57, including GitHub's own comments feed
The advertised link has gone stale	The <link> tag points at an address that has moved	0 of 57
Duplicate item IDs	Every reader shows the same post twice	0 of 57
Relative links (/post/1)	The link opens nothing in a reader	0 of 57
Served as text/html	Some readers refuse the feed outright	0 of 57

Those zeros are the honest result on 57 mostly well-run feeds, printed rather than hidden. The point of the report is what happens when one of them is not zero: the row says so, in plain English, and nothing else on this store will tell you.

3. It never guesses on a site that said no. Every address FeedHound asks for - including the guesses - is checked against the robots.txt of the host that serves it, before it is fetched. Redirects are followed the way a browser follows them, and the host it lands on gets its policy read too. GitHub bans /*.atom and YouTube bans /feeds/videos.xml, so FeedHound will not read those and tells you exactly why instead of quietly scraping them anyway.

4. Four formats, one shape. RSS 2.0, Atom, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and JSON Feed all come back with the same field names. Dates are normalised to ISO 8601 - including the RFC 822 timezone names (EST, CEST) that most parsers drop, and including a date with no timezone at all, which is pinned to UTC so the same feed never yields two different timestamps.

5. The best feed is first. When a site has several, they are ranked and the live one is rank: 1. Quanta Magazine's page advertises an abandoned 2013 feed before its real one; take the first row from any other tool and you get the dead one.

---

📋 What comes back

One row per feed found. One charge per source, however many feeds that is.

About the feed

Field	What it is	Blogs & news	Ordinary business sites
feedUrl	The working feed address, after redirects	100%	100%
feedTitle	The feed's own title	98%	100%
feedType	rss, atom, rdf or json	100%	100%
feedVersion	e.g. 2.0, 1.1	100%	100%
discoveredVia	direct, autodiscovery, page-link, common-path or platform:*	100%	100%
rank / isPrimary	Which of this site's feeds is the live one	100%	100%
description	The feed's own description	91%	63%
siteUrl	The website the feed belongs to	100%	100%
language	e.g. en-gb	77%	63%
imageUrl	Feed logo or cover art	45%	25%
generator	WordPress, Ghost, Hugo, Squarespace...	52%	50%
categories	Feed-level tags	11%	0%
hubUrl	WebSub hub, if the feed supports push	2%	0%
itemCount	Posts in the feed	100%	100%
lastItemAt	Date of the newest post	95%	88%
daysSinceLastItem	How quiet it has gone	95%	88%
postsPerMonth	Real publishing cadence from the item dates	93%	88%
isPodcast, podcastAuthor, episodeCount	Apple podcast tags, only when there is real audio	5 podcasts found	0
feedsFoundForSource	How many feeds this one source had	100%	100%
candidatesChecked	How many addresses were tried	100%	100%
robotsRespected, crawlDelaySecs	The policy that was obeyed	100%	100%

The health report (health, 31 fields)

score 0-100 · verdict (healthy / minor issues / needs attention / empty / broken) · issues (defects, in plain English) · notes (facts that are not faults) · moved · requestedUrl · finalUrl · httpStatus · contentType · contentTypeOk · secure · sizeBytes · truncated · responseMs · itemCount · itemsMissingDate · itemsWithUnparseableDate · itemsMissingLink · itemsMissingTitle · itemsMissingGuid · duplicateGuids · duplicateTitles · itemsWithRelativeLink · itemsWithInsecureLink · fullContentRatio · firstItemAt · lastItemAt · daysSinceLastItem · postsPerMonth · stale · dormant

Every post (items, 15 fields each)

title · link · guid · publishedAt · updatedAt · author · summary (plain text, always) · contentHtml (markup kept) · contentChars (length of that markup) · textChars (length of the text inside it) · categories · imageUrl · enclosure (url, type, size) · durationSecs · commentsUrl

---

⚙️ How to use it

1. Paste your list into Websites or feed URLs. Bare domains (arstechnica.com), sections (stripe.com/blog) and feed URLs (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss) can all be mixed in one run.
2. Leave everything else alone. The defaults are 5 feeds and 50 posts per source.
3. Press Start.
4. Take Feed health table (CSV) for the one-row-per-feed spreadsheet, or Every post, one per row (CSV) for the posts.

Speed, measured: 45 blogs and news sites took 42 seconds at 8 at a time - 1.8 seconds per source. Ordinary business sites average 2.9 seconds each, because having no feed means every standard address gets tried. At the default 5 at a time, a 50-site list of ordinary businesses takes about 30 seconds.

---

💵 Pricing

Per source where a feed with posts was found	$0.02
Per feed found on that site	$0.00
Per post returned	$0.00
A source with no feed, or only an empty one	$0.00
Apify platform usage on top	$0.00

Your list	You pay
10 sites	$0.20
100 sites	$2.00
1,000 sites	$20.00

The nearest alternative on this store charges $0.035 per run plus about $0.001 per post - $0.00115 on the free plan, less on the largest paid ones (its live pricing, checked 2026-09-03) - and requires you to already know every feed URL. One site with 100 posts costs $0.135 there and $0.02 here, and here you did not have to know the address.

---

📄 Example output

A real row, saved in full at examples/example-row.json:

{
  "source": "github.blog",
  "ok": true,
  "rank": 1,
  "isPrimary": true,
  "discoveredVia": "autodiscovery",
  "feedUrl": "https://github.blog/feed/",
  "feedTitle": "The GitHub Blog",
  "feedType": "rss",
  "feedVersion": "2.0",
  "siteUrl": "https://github.blog/",
  "description": "Updates, ideas, and inspiration from GitHub to help developers build and design software.",
  "language": "en-us",
  "generator": "WordPress 7.1",
  "itemCount": 10,
  "lastItemAt": "2026-09-02T21:00:00.000Z",
  "daysSinceLastItem": 0,
  "postsPerMonth": 14.06,
  "healthScore": 100,
  "verdict": "healthy",
  "issues": [],
  "notes": ["items carry the full post, not just a summary"],
  "candidatesChecked": 3,
  "robotsRespected": true,
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Decoding the new AI lingo: Loops, harnesses, squads, hill climbing… oh my!",
      "link": "https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/decoding-the-new-ai-lingo-loops-harnesses-squads-hill-climbing-oh-my/",
      "publishedAt": "2026-09-02T21:00:00.000Z",
      "author": "Cassidy Williams",
      "summary": "From loop engineering to harnesses, squads, and open weights, the GitHub Podcast breaks down the AI terms showing up in developer conversations. The post Decoding the new AI lingo: Loops, harnesses, squads, hill climbing… oh my! appeared first on The GitHub Blog.",
      "contentChars": 9150,
      "textChars": 6403
    }
  ]
}

And two feeds with a real problem, from the same run:

{
  "source": "developers.googleblog.com",
  "feedTitle": "Google Developers Blog",
  "healthScore": 80,
  "verdict": "minor issues",
  "issues": ["20 of 20 items have no date, so readers cannot sort them"]
}
{
  "source": "quantamagazine.org",
  "feedTitle": "Quanta Magazine - Illuminating science",
  "isPrimary": false,
  "daysSinceLastItem": 4802,
  "healthScore": 70,
  "verdict": "needs attention",
  "issues": ["no new item for 4802 days - this feed looks abandoned"]
}

That second one is rank: 2. Quanta's page lists it first; the live feed is the row you get at rank: 1.

---

🎯 What people use it for

• Building a reader, aggregator or newsletter. Hand it 500 sites, get back every feed plus every post, in one shape, without writing four parsers.
• Competitor and category monitoring. Which of these 200 companies still publishes, how often, and when did they last post?
• Auditing your own feeds. Ship a feed with duplicate GUIDs or no dates and nobody tells you. This does.
• Podcast directories. Apple's itunes: tags, episode counts, enclosure URLs and durations, only flagged as a podcast when there is real audio.
• Cleaning an old OPML or subscription list. Which of these 300 feeds are dead, which are empty, which are still worth polling?

---

💻 Run it from code

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('abusch500/feedhound-rss-feed-finder').call({
    sources: ['arstechnica.com', 'stripe.com/blog', 'https://news.ycombinator.com/rss'],
    maxItemsPerFeed: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("abusch500/feedhound-rss-feed-finder").call(run_input={
    "sources": ["arstechnica.com", "stripe.com/blog"],
    "maxItemsPerFeed": 50,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["feedUrl"], item["healthScore"], item["issues"])

curl

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/abusch500~feedhound-rss-feed-finder/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"sources":["arstechnica.com"],"maxItemsPerFeed":10}'

n8n / Make / Zapier - use the Apify app's "Run an Actor" step, pick this actor, and map sources to your list column. MCP - available through Apify's MCP server as abusch500/feedhound-rss-feed-finder.

---

🎛️ Input

Field	Default	What it does
sources	required	Websites, sections or feed URLs, one per line
maxFeedsPerSource	5	Most feeds to return per source. Raising it costs nothing extra
maxItemsPerFeed	50	Posts per feed. 0 returns feed details and health only
includeItems	true	Turn off for a smaller result
probeCommonPaths	true	Guess standard addresses, but only when a site advertises none
maxConcurrency	5	Sources at a time. Requests to one site are always spaced out
requestTimeoutSecs	20	Per request
respectRobotsTxt	true	Leave it on unless you own every site in the list

---

🌐 Where the data comes from

Source	What is read
The page you named	<link rel="alternate"> tags and footer links
robots.txt	Of every host that serves an address, checked before it is fetched
The feed itself	The publisher's own RSS / Atom / RDF / JSON Feed document
Platform feed rules	Medium, Substack, Blogger and Shopify publish feeds at fixed addresses

Nothing behind a login, a paywall or a cookie wall is touched, and no page is crawled: FeedHound reads the address you gave it plus, at most, a short list of standard feed addresses on the same site. Every address it asks for - including the guesses - is checked against the robots.txt of the host that serves it, before it is fetched. Redirects are followed the way a browser follows them, and the host they land on gets its policy read too. Crawl-delay is obeyed - per host, and a site asking for more than 2 seconds between requests gets no address guessing at all, only what it advertises itself. The Obey robots.txt switch exists for your own domains.

---

🤖 For site owners

FeedHound identifies itself as:

FeedHoundBot/0.1 (+https://apify.com/abusch500/feedhound-rss-feed-finder; finds and validates public RSS/Atom/JSON feeds)

To block it, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: FeedHoundBot
Disallow: /

It will then be skipped, and the person who ran it is not charged. A typical visit is 3 requests - robots.txt, your page, your feed - and at most about 17 if your site advertises no feed at all: robots.txt, your page, and up to 14 standard addresses. A feed found by guessing stops the guessing there.

---

❓ FAQ

I already know my feed URL. Is this still worth it? Then you are paying $0.02 for the health report and the normalised posts. If all you want is items from a feed URL you already have, a plain feed reader is cheaper.

Why did it find no feed on my site? Most sites genuinely have none. Of 20 ordinary business and product sites - Figma, Notion, Atlassian, Mailchimp, Webflow, Basecamp among them - 8 had a feed, and 7 of those had posts in it. You are not charged for the other 13.

What does the health score mean? 100 is a feed with no defects. Points come off for things that break a reader: no items (0 outright), missing or unparseable dates, missing links, relative links, missing or duplicate IDs, missing titles, a feed that has gone quiet for much longer than usual, a wrong content type, plain http, and an advertised link that has gone stale. Choices that are not defects - summaries instead of full text, a declared poll interval, a feed served through a podcast host - go in notes and cost nothing.

What does verdict: empty mean, and am I charged for it? The feed is real and works; there is just nothing in it yet. GitHub's own comments feed is one. You are not charged for a source whose only feeds are empty, and the row still comes back, because "this one is dead" is exactly what you want when you are cleaning a subscription list.

Why is issues empty but notes full? Because they are different things. issues are faults. notes are facts worth knowing about a feed that is working correctly.

Why won't it read a GitHub or YouTube feed? Both explicitly disallow them: GitHub's robots.txt bans /*.atom and YouTube's bans /feeds/videos.xml. FeedHound obeys that and says so in the error column rather than fetching anyway.

Does it follow redirects? Yes, and it tells you which kind. A redirect to https or to www on the same path is a note. A guessed address resolving to the real one is a note - the address you get back in feedUrl is always the working one. A feed served through another host (a podcast on Megaphone or Libsyn, say) is a note, because that is how the publisher meant it. Only an address you gave it, or a <link> tag on the page, pointing somewhere that has actually moved is reported as a problem.

My blog only posts a few times a year. Will it be called stale? No. "Quiet" is measured against that feed's own rhythm - three times its usual gap between posts, and never sooner than 90 days. A feed that posts quarterly and last posted four months ago scores 100. After a full year with nothing, any feed is called abandoned.

Some sites return 403. Why? A minority of large publishers block automated clients outright, whoever is asking. 2 of 45 did in testing, and that test ran from a home connection - this actor runs from a datacenter, where the rate is higher. Those rows come back with the reason and are not charged. If a site refuses the guessed addresses, the row says the site refused rather than claiming there is no feed.

Does it work with podcasts? Yes. Apple's itunes: tags, episode counts, audio URLs and durations. A feed is only labelled a podcast when it has both the namespace and real audio enclosures - plenty of ordinary blogs carry itunes: tags from a plugin, and calling those podcasts would be a lie.

What about JSON Feed? Fully supported, including application/json as the content type, which the spec allows and most publishers use.

How fresh is the data? It is fetched live at the moment you run it. Nothing is cached.

Can it find every feed on a site? No tool can. It finds the ones the site advertises, the ones its platform publishes at a known address, and the ones sitting at a standard address. A feed at /nature.rss with nothing linking to it will be missed.

Will it hammer my site? No. Requests to one host are serialised and spaced by that host's declared Crawl-delay, no matter how high maxConcurrency is set.

What is the biggest feed it can read? 8 MB. Beyond that it reads what it can and says truncated: true rather than pretending it saw everything, and a note says how many posts it did see. One feed of the 57 in testing hit this - a podcast archive with 868 episodes - and it is not counted as a defect, because it is our limit and not the publisher's.

Can I get the posts as one row each? Yes - the Every post, one per row (CSV) output link does exactly that.

---

⚠️ Notes and limits

• 2 of 45 large publishers answered 403 in testing, from a home connection. Expect somewhat more from a datacenter IP, which is where this actor runs. Never charged.
• Ordinary business sites usually have no feed - 12 of 20 had none in testing. Point this at blogs, news, docs and podcasts, where 80% had one.
• Path guessing tries at most 14 addresses, only when a site advertises none, and stops at the first one that answers with posts.
• The health report is calculated on every post in the feed - up to 2,000 posts, or the first 8 MB - even when you ask for fewer back.
• Feeds are de-duplicated: /feed, /feed/, /rss and /?feed=rss2 on a default WordPress install are one feed, and come back once.

---

📮 Support and changelog

Something missed or a health flag that looks wrong? Open an issue on the actor page with the URL - missed sites become test cases.

0.1 (2026-09-04) - first release. Feed discovery from a website URL, RSS 2.0 / Atom / RSS 1.0 (RDF) / JSON Feed parsing, the 31-field health report, podcast tags, robots.txt enforced per host on every request including guesses. 159 automated tests. Verified against 75 real sources.