RSS Feed Scraper

RSS Feed Scraper reads RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Atom feeds and returns one row per item: title, link, publication time in UTC, author, categories, a plain-text summary and, on request, the full text the feed carries. Podcast feeds also give the audio file, its length and the episode type. Paste feed URLs into Feed URLs and click Start; a run over ten feeds returned 259 items in under 5 seconds in October 2026. It needs the feed address itself and does not search a homepage for one. It costs $0.90 per 1,000 feed items on the Free plan ($0.45 on Business), and the $5 of monthly credit in Apify's Free plan covers about 5,500 feed items.

What data does it return?

Field	Description
title, link	Item title and the page it points to, usually the article or episode page. link is null when the feed lists none.
publishedAt	Publication time from the feed's pubDate, dc:date or Atom published (or updated), converted to ISO 8601 UTC, such as 2026-10-11T15:15:00.000Z. null when the feed gives no date.
author	Author as the feed lists it for the item (author, dc:creator, itunes:author or the Atom author name), otherwise the author of the whole feed. BBC News lists none.
summary	The item description as plain text, with HTML tags removed and paragraphs kept as line breaks. Cut to 300 characters ending in ... unless Full text is on.
content	With Full text on, the whole text the feed carries for the item (content:encoded or Atom content, falling back to the description), as plain text. Otherwise null.
categories	Category or tag labels of the item, such as Movie Review. An empty list when the feed has none.
image	The item image from itunes:image, otherwise the logo of the feed.
audioUrl, audioType, audioBytes	The file attached as an enclosure, its MIME type such as audio/mpeg, and its size in bytes as the feed declares it. A few blogs attach a picture here, which then shows as image/png.
durationSeconds, episodeNumber, seasonNumber, episodeType, explicit	Podcast tags: length in seconds, episode and season number, full, trailer or bonus, and the explicit flag. null in news and blog feeds.
feedTitle, feedUrl	Title the feed gives itself, such as BBC News, and the feed URL you entered.
guid, key	The item ID from the feed (RSS guid, RDF rdf:about or Atom id, otherwise the enclosure URL or the link), and the row key made of feed URL and ID, which new-only mode compares between runs.
podcastName, podcastKey, podcastAppleId, appleUrl, episodeSource, type	Fields shared with our podcast actors. Here podcastName repeats the feed title, podcastAppleId and appleUrl are always null, episodeSource is rss and type is item.

How to scrape RSS and Atom feeds

1. Enter one or more addresses in Feed URLs, one per line. Each must return the feed XML itself, such as https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml. Sites usually link their feed in the page header or serve it at /feed or /rss.
2. Set Maximum items per feed (100 by default). Items are sorted newest first, so a low number keeps the latest ones.
3. To narrow the output, add Keywords (any of), matched as whole words or phrases in the title, summary and categories, or a Published after date. Items without a date pass the date filter.
4. Turn on Full text when you need whole articles or show notes in content.
5. Click Start. Items appear in the Output tab and can be downloaded as JSON, CSV or Excel. The SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store counts the items under itemsFound and itemsReturned, lists unreadable feeds under feedsFailed and counts the items each filter removed under droppedByFilter.

An input for the API that watches two feeds for new items about datacentres or open source:

{
  "feeds": ["https://www.theguardian.com/uk/technology/rss", "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 50,
  "keywords": ["datacentre", "open source"],
  "publishedAfter": "2026-10-01",
  "includeContent": true,
  "newOnly": true,
  "watchName": "tech-news"
}

Example output

One item from The Verge in a run on 11 October 2026 with default settings. The actor cut summary at 300 characters, and content is null because Full text was off.

{
  "type": "item",
  "key": "episode:podcast:feed:https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml:https://www.theverge.com/?p=1009346",
  "podcastKey": "podcast:feed:https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
  "podcastAppleId": null,
  "podcastName": "The Verge",
  "feedTitle": "The Verge",
  "feedUrl": "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
  "title": "George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch is a slow-burn feminist occult drama",
  "link": "https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/1009346/george-a-romero-season-of-the-witch-feminist-horror-review",
  "appleUrl": null,
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-11T15:15:00.000Z",
  "durationSeconds": null,
  "episodeNumber": null,
  "seasonNumber": null,
  "episodeType": null,
  "explicit": null,
  "author": "Terrence O’Brien",
  "summary": "George A. Romero is obviously best known as the father of the modern zombie movie. But between inventing the genre with Night of the Living Dead and his outbreak horror, The Crazies, Romero made two much lesser-known films: There's Always Vanilla, which I'll admit I've never seen, and Season of t...",
  "content": null,
  "categories": [
    "Column",
    "Entertainment",
    "Film",
    "Movie Review"
  ],
  "image": "https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1",
  "audioUrl": null,
  "audioType": null,
  "audioBytes": null,
  "guid": "https://www.theverge.com/?p=1009346",
  "episodeSource": "rss"
}

How much does it cost to scrape RSS feeds?

	Free plan	Starter	Scale	Business
1,000 feed items	$0.90	$0.72	$0.585	$0.45

You pay only for the events in the table. There is no start fee, and compute time and proxies are included.

A daily run over 100 feeds with 50 items each returns at most 5,000 items, $4.50 on the Free plan and $2.25 on Business. You pay only for rows written: items removed by a filter, items already returned in new-only mode and feeds that could not be read cost nothing.

Limits and known issues

• A feed holds only what the publisher keeps in it. In the October 2026 test, The Verge and NASA served 10 items each, BBC News 25, the Guardian technology feed 32 and the Planet Money podcast 355. Older items that left the feed cannot be read.
• RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Atom are supported; Slashdot's RDF feed gave 15 items in the October 2026 test. JSON Feed is not read, and a feed whose items cannot be read is listed in feedsFailed.
• content holds only the text the publisher puts in the feed. BBC News sends a one-sentence description, so for whole articles open link with an article extractor.
• Keywords match whole words and ignore case, and a keyword of several words matches as a phrase. ai keeps items about AI but not items that only contain said, and datacentre does not match datacentres, so add plural forms you want.
• Up to 4 feeds are read at a time. Each request waits up to 60 seconds and is repeated twice after a server error or HTTP 429. A feed that still fails, or returns something other than RSS or Atom, is listed in feedsFailed. If fewer than half of the feeds can be read, the run ends as failed.
• The whole run returns at most the number set in Maximum rows, 5,000 by default.
• Items without a guid, an enclosure or a link get an ID made of title and date, so editing the title of such an item makes it count as new.

Watching feeds for new items

Turn on Return only rows new since the last run and set a Watch name, or save the input as a task, which gets its own snapshot automatically. Then add a schedule, hourly or daily. Each run returns only items whose key the previous run of that watch did not have; the first run returns everything and saves the snapshot. Items cut off by Maximum rows are kept for the next run.

Every run with a watch also writes a CHANGES record with added and removed counts and the keys of the items concerned. The snapshot holds the items the feed listed last time, so an item that drops out of the feed and reappears later counts as new again.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape RSS feeds?

Publishers offer RSS and Atom feeds so that readers and apps can fetch them, and the actor requests only the feed URLs you enter, without logging in. Rows contain what the publisher put in the feed, including the bylines of article authors. Republishing full text can infringe the publisher's copyright, and you are responsible for how you use the data.

Can I find the feed of a website with it?

No. The actor needs the feed address. On most news sites and blogs it is linked in the page source as application/rss+xml, or sits at /feed, /rss or /atom.xml.

Does it read podcast feeds?

Yes. Any podcast RSS feed works, with the audio URL, file size, duration, episode type and the explicit flag. To search Apple Podcasts or read its charts, use the Apple Podcasts actor listed below.

Why is author or publishedAt empty for some items?

The feed did not publish it. author falls back to the author of the whole feed when an item has none; other values are never filled in by the actor, so a missing value is null.

Related scrapers

• Apple Podcasts Scraper
• Google News Scraper
• Article Extractor
• Substack Scraper
• Sitemap Extractor

Support

This actor is built and maintained by deriverge s.r.o., a software company based in the Czech Republic. If a run fails or a field you need is missing, please open an issue in the Issues tab or write to us at info@deriverge.com. We respond in English and Czech. Runs can be scheduled in Apify Console or started from the API tab, which has examples for Python, JavaScript and cURL and works with Make, Zapier, n8n and the Apify MCP server. If the actor saves you time, a short review helps other people find it.