EU & Dutch News Monitor: RSS Keyword Alerts for NL, BE and EU News

Track keywords across 84 verified Dutch, Belgian, German, French and EU news and official RSS feeds, or your own feeds, for $0.002 per matching article. Each match gives you the headline, a clean link to the article, the source, the publication date, the publisher's teaser snippet, the keywords that matched, and the language and country. Turn on only new articles and schedule it, and you get a simple media monitoring feed for brands, competitors, policy files or topics such as AI Act, stikstof, ECB, Tata Steel or Schiphol. Export to CSV, Excel or JSON, or pull it through the API into Slack, Sheets, Make, Zapier or n8n.

Failed feeds and invalid input lines show up in the dataset as clearly marked error rows and are never charged. Every field has a default, so a run with only keywords works fine.

Who is this news monitor for?

• PR, communications and public-affairs teams who need brand mentions, competitor news or an issue (stikstof, netcongestie, AI Act, Omnibus) followed in Dutch and Belgian media and EU institutions.
• Policy and EU-affairs professionals who track press releases from the European Commission, Parliament, Council, ECB, EBA and EDPB next to POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Euronews.
• Analysts, investors and journalists who want a daily keyword digest from NOS, NU.nl, NRC, FD, De Tijd, Handelsblatt, Le Monde and others, without reading 80 sites.
• Developers and AI agents who need a cheap, structured news feed for the Benelux and EU. The data is metadata only, with stable articleIds for deduplication.

What does EU & Dutch News Monitor do?

1. Reads the curated list of public RSS/Atom feeds for the countries you choose, plus any feeds you add yourself. You can optionally also search the free GDELT news index.
2. Keeps articles published in the last publishedWithinHours hours (default 48) whose headline or teaser match your keywords and do not contain any of your exclude terms.
3. Removes duplicates (the same URL, or the same headline from two feeds), strips tracking parameters such as utm_* and xtor from links, and sorts the results newest first.
4. With onlyNew, it remembers what it delivered in a named key-value store and skips those articles next time. You only pay for new articles.
5. Writes a RUN_SUMMARY with counts per keyword and per source, any feeds that failed, and whether maxResults or your charge limit was reached.

Keyword matching

You type	Matches	Doesn't match
stikstof	stikstof, Stikstofwet, stikstofuitstoot (words of 4+ letters also match compounds)	ministikstof
AI, ECB, KLM	an acronym in CAPITALS: the exact word, case-sensitive (AI-regels, de ECB)	mail, French j'ai, Ai
"AI Act"	the exact phrase	AI Actions
energie*	anything starting with energie
Tata Steel	the words in sequence

Matching ignores accents (Mélenchon = melenchon) and, except for capital acronyms, ignores case. Use matchMode: "all" to require every keyword, and excludeKeywords to drop noise such as sport or advertorials.

Built-in sources (84 feeds, checked against robots.txt)

• Netherlands (37): NOS (news, domestic, foreign, politics, economy, tech, Nieuwsuur, sport), NU.nl (6 sections plus sport), RTL Nieuws, NRC, de Volkskrant, Trouw, Het Parool, AD, De Telegraaf, Nederlands Dagblad, Het Financieele Dagblad, Tweakers, Security.NL, Computable, Bright, and the regional broadcasters Omroep West, Rijnmond, RTV Utrecht, Omroep Gelderland, Omroep Brabant, RTV Noord and L1 Limburg.
• Belgium (9): VRT NWS, HLN, De Morgen, De Tijd, RTBF Info, La Libre Belgique, DH, 7sur7, L'Echo.
• Germany (12): tagesschau.de, DER SPIEGEL, ZEIT ONLINE, FAZ.NET, Süddeutsche Zeitung, ZDFheute, Deutsche Welle (DE and EN), Handelsblatt, heise online, t3n, Bundesregierung.
• France (8): Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, franceinfo, 20 Minutes, BFMTV, France 24 (FR and EN Europe).
• EU and pan-European (18): European Commission press corner (EN and NL), European Parliament, Council of the EU, ECB, EBA, EDPB, EUR-Lex Official Journal, POLITICO Europe (main, tech, energy), EUobserver, Euronews (main, business, next), BBC News Europe and Business, Sifted.

You can narrow the selection with countries, languages and categories (general, politics, business, tech, regional, official, sport). Sport is off by default. This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of these publishers.

How to use it

1. Enter your keywords, and optionally exclude terms.
2. Pick the countries (default NL, BE and EU) and, if you like, languages and categories.
3. Add your own RSS feeds if needed, for example a trade journal, a competitor's newsroom, or a Google Alerts RSS feed you created yourself.
4. Set published within (hours) and max articles.
5. For a recurring monitor, switch on only new articles, give it a monitor name, save it as a task and schedule it (every few hours or daily).

Input example

{
  "keywords": ["\"AI Act\"", "stikstof", "ECB"],
  "excludeKeywords": ["voetbal"],
  "countries": ["NL", "BE", "EU"],
  "customFeeds": [],
  "publishedWithinHours": 48,
  "onlyNew": true,
  "monitorName": "policy-watch",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Field	Default	What it does
keywords	AI Act, stikstof, ECB	Words or phrases to find. Leave empty to get every article from the selected feeds.
matchMode	any	any (OR) or all (AND).
excludeKeywords	empty	Drop articles containing any of these.
searchIn	titleAndSnippet	titleAndSnippet or title only.
countries	NL, BE, EU	Which built-in feeds to read: NL, BE, DE, FR, EU.
languages	all	Only built-in feeds in nl, en, de, fr.
categories	all except sport	general, politics, business, tech, regional, official, sport.
useBuiltInFeeds	true	Switch off to read only your own feeds.
customFeeds	empty	Your RSS, RDF or Atom feed URLs (up to 200).
searchGdelt	false	Also search the GDELT index (beta; headline and link only).
publishedWithinHours	48	Time window, 0–2160 hours. 0 means everything still in the feeds.
onlyNew	false	Skip articles delivered in earlier runs.
monitorName	empty	Name of the only-new memory. Without it, the memory is tied to your settings.
maxResults	100	Maximum articles per run (1–10,000), and your cost cap.
maxPerSource	0	Optional cap per news site. 0 means no cap.

Output example

One row per matching article, in the Articles table view:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "Kabinet presenteert nieuw stikstofplan voor boeren",
  "url": "https://nos.nl/artikel/2589123-kabinet-presenteert-nieuw-stikstofplan-voor-boeren",
  "source": "NOS Politiek",
  "sourceDomain": "nos.nl",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-25T08:16:00.000Z",
  "snippet": "Het kabinet wil de uitstoot in 2030 halveren en trekt daarvoor extra geld uit…",
  "matchedKeywords": ["stikstof"],
  "matchedIn": "title+snippet",
  "language": "nl",
  "country": "NL",
  "category": "politics",
  "author": null,
  "imageUrl": "https://cdn.nos.nl/image/2026/10/25/1234567/1024x576a.jpg",
  "origin": "built-in",
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwspolitiek",
  "articleId": "67a8eb3ea3e662b95add",
  "isNew": true,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-25T09:30:00.000Z",
  "charged": true,
  "error": null
}

A feed that could not be read becomes a free row with status: "error", the feed URL and the reason (HTTP status, timeout, not a feed, or disallowed by robots.txt). The RUN_SUMMARY record in the key-value store contains articles, charged, matchedBeforeLimits, duplicatesRemoved, alreadySeenSkipped, chargeLimitReached, maxResultsReached, feedsFailed, byKeyword, bySource and a status for every feed.

Speed

All feeds are read in parallel (8 at a time, with a polite delay per host). A default run with about 60 feeds takes 10–20 seconds at 256 MB. GDELT adds up to about a minute when it is enabled.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay per event: $0.002 per matching article, with platform usage included. Failed feeds, error rows, duplicates and articles skipped as already seen are free. Higher Apify plans pay less, down to $0.001.

Event	Free plan	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum / Diamond
News article	$0.002	$0.0018	$0.0015	$0.0012	$0.001
Actor start (per run)	$0.005

Cost table (Free plan prices)

Use	Articles	Cost
Quick keyword check	10	$0.025
Default run	up to 100	up to $0.205
Big daily digest	1,000	$2.005
Only-new monitor every 4 hours, about 10 new articles per run	60/day	about $0.15/day (≈ $4.50/month)

Bill-shock protection:

• A run never returns more than maxResults articles (default 100, so at most $0.205 per run on the Free plan).
• It stops cleanly at your maximum cost per run. RUN_SUMMARY.chargeLimitReached is then true, and the number of articles that did not fit is reported.
• With onlyNew, articles you already received are skipped before charging.
• Error rows, failed feeds and invalid input are never charged. Invalid input fails the run with a clear message instead of returning an empty result.

FAQ

Does it scrape full articles?

No. It only uses what publishers put in their public RSS feeds: headline, link, date, teaser and image. It never opens article pages and never goes behind paywalls. Click through to read the article on the publisher's site.

Why don't I see older articles?

RSS feeds contain only the latest items (usually 10–150 per feed). For a continuous record, schedule the Actor with onlyNew every few hours, or enable GDELT for a wider search.

Does it include Google News?

No. Google News and Bing News RSS terms only allow personal, non-commercial use, and Google's robots.txt disallows automated access to its RSS search. That's why we read publishers' own feeds and GDELT, an open news index. You can add any RSS feed you are allowed to use, including a Google Alerts feed you created for yourself.

What is GDELT and why is it in beta?

GDELT is a free, open index of news from thousands of outlets worldwide. It finds articles beyond the built-in feeds, but only gives headline, link and date, not a snippet. It also throttles busy shared IP addresses. When GDELT is slow or unavailable, the run continues with the RSS feeds and says so in the status message and RUN_SUMMARY.gdelt.

Why was a feed marked as an error?

The error field says why: the site was down, the URL is not an RSS/Atom feed, or the site's robots.txt does not allow bots to fetch it. These rows are free. A run only fails when no source could be read at all.

Can I get Slack, email or Sheets alerts?

Yes. Save a task with onlyNew: true, schedule it, and connect an Apify integration (Slack, email, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, webhooks) to new dataset items. It also works through the Apify API and MCP server for AI agents.

Is it legal?

The Actor reads public RSS feeds, which publishers provide so that their headlines can be syndicated. It identifies itself with its own user agent (NewsRssMonitor), respects robots.txt, keeps request rates low, and returns only metadata and the publisher's own teaser with a link back to the source. It does not copy full articles. Headlines and snippets remain the publishers' copyright, so use the results for monitoring and linking, not for republishing.

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