# RSS Feed Monitor – New Items Only, Keyword Alerts (`appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor`) Actor

Monitor RSS, Atom and JSON feeds and get only new, deduplicated items, filtered by your keywords. Paste a website URL and its feed is found automatically. Already-seen, duplicate and filtered items are free. Built for scheduled news and keyword alerts.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor.md
- **Developed by:** [GM Labs](https://apify.com/appetizing_horsefly) (community)
- **Categories:** News, Automation, Marketing
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 28.6% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

$1.00 / 1,000 new items

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## RSS and News Feed Monitor: deduped new items and keyword alerts

**Monitor any number of RSS, Atom or JSON feeds and get only new, deduplicated items, filtered by your keywords.** Paste a website URL and its feed is found automatically. Schedule it hourly or daily, then send results to Slack, email, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier or n8n with Apify integrations.

Use it for **brand and competitor monitoring, PR and media tracking, industry news alerts, content curation, and feeding news into AI agents**.

### What makes it reliable

- **Only new items.** It remembers what it has already seen, so each item is output (and billed) once.
- **Cross-feed dedupe.** The same story syndicated in several feeds is output once. Tracking parameters (`utm_*`) are stripped from links.
- **No charge on empty runs.** If nothing is new, the dataset stays empty and you pay $0 for results. Broken feeds are reported per feed. If *all* feeds fail, the run fails loudly.
- **Hard caps.** `maxItems`, `maxItemsPerFeed`, per-feed timeouts, 3 retries.
- **Feed auto-discovery** from `<link rel="alternate">`, with support for RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0/RDF, Atom and JSON Feed.

### Try it free in 1 click

The input form is **prefilled with a small, working example**. Press **Start** without changing anything: the run reads the Hacker News front page and The Verge feeds and returns 20 fresh items. Our test run of exactly this input finished in about 6 seconds with 20 results. At list price that is about $0.02, which fits inside the free monthly credit of Apify's free plan. Then swap in your own values.

Prefilled input:

```json
{
  "feeds": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"
  ],
  "maxItems": 20
}
```

### Sample output

Real rows from the prefilled run on 2026-10-14 (5 of 20 results shown; long fields trimmed). Download the full dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

| feedTitle | title | source | published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hacker News: Front Page | I built a tool to track what AI leaders say and how th… | blumify.io | 2026-10-14T01:09:13.000Z |
| Hacker News: Front Page | High-speed video reveals how honey bee stingers pump v… | arstechnica.com | 2026-10-14T01:05:23.000Z |
| Hacker News: Front Page | Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI mod… | pulseos.finance | 2026-10-13T23:13:23.000Z |
| Hacker News: Front Page | Recreational Programming | www.cphiri.dev | 2026-10-13T22:33:33.000Z |
| Hacker News: Front Page | AlphaNIST | alpha-nist.github.io | 2026-10-13T21:57:29.000Z |

### Input (copy-paste)

```json
{
  "feeds": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "https://blog.apify.com", "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"],
  "keywords": ["AI", "scraping", "open source"],
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "stateStoreName": "my-ai-news-monitor",
  "maxItems": 500
}
```

### API (copy-paste)

```bash
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/appetizing_horsefly~rss-news-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"feeds":["https://hnrss.org/frontpage"],"keywords":["AI"]}'
```

### Output

```json
{"title":"...","link":"https://example.com/story","published":"2026-10-10T05:12:00.000Z","source":"example.com","matchedKeywords":["ai"],"feedTitle":"Hacker News: Front Page","summary":"..."}
```

A per-feed health report is saved as `SUMMARY` in the key-value store.

### Pricing

Pay per event: **$0.001 per new item** ($1 per 1,000). Already-seen, duplicate and filtered items are free.

### Use it as an MCP tool (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, any AI agent)

This Actor works as a tool in the [Apify MCP server](https://mcp.apify.com), so an AI agent can call it directly and you pay per result, the same as a normal run. Add this server URL to any MCP client:

```
https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor
```

Sign in with your Apify account (or pass your Apify API token as a Bearer header). The agent reads the input fields above from the Actor's input schema. Example request to the agent: "Check these 3 blogs' feeds and return new posts mentioning 'pricing' since the last run."

# Actor input Schema

## `feeds` (type: `array`):

RSS/Atom/JSON Feed URLs, or website URLs (the feed is auto-discovered from <link rel=alternate>).

## `keywords` (type: `array`):

Keep items whose title or summary contains ANY of these (case-insensitive). Empty = all items.

## `excludeKeywords` (type: `array`):

Drop items containing any of these.

## `onlyNewSinceLastRun` (type: `boolean`):

Remember items from previous runs (named key-value store) and output only new ones. Schedule hourly/daily for alerts.

## `stateStoreName` (type: `string`):

Named key-value store for 'only new' memory. Use a different name per monitor.

## `publishedWithinHours` (type: `integer`):

Drop items older than this (when the feed gives a date). 0 = any age.

## `maxItemsPerFeed` (type: `integer`):

Cap per feed. 0 = all items in the feed.

## `maxItems` (type: `integer`):

Total output cap; you are never billed for more. 0 = no cap.

## `requestTimeoutSecs` (type: `integer`):

Per-feed timeout; retried 3 times.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "feeds": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"
  ],
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "stateStoreName": "rss-monitor-state",
  "publishedWithinHours": 0,
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 0,
  "maxItems": 20,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 20
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

All results in the default dataset

## `summary` (type: `string`):

Counts, caps hit, errors

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "feeds": [
        "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
        "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"
    ],
    "maxItems": 20
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "feeds": [
        "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
        "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
    ],
    "maxItems": 20,
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "feeds": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"
  ],
  "maxItems": 20
}' |
apify call appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,appetizing_horsefly/rss-news-monitor"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/cI9UBzNg7dYsVV5gF/builds/k6sicniipvoTjeYDj/openapi.json