RSS Feed Reader & Monitor

Turn any RSS, Atom or podcast feed into clean, structured data. You can also just enter a website address: the Actor finds its feed for you.

Switch on Only new items, schedule the Actor, and get only fresh articles, job posts, press releases or podcast episodes on every run. Send them to Slack, email, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n or your AI agent.

What you can use it for

• News and competitor monitoring: follow competitors' blogs, newsrooms and changelogs and get only what is new.
• Content curation and newsletters: collect fresh posts from dozens of sources and filter them by keywords.
• AI and RAG pipelines: clean full-text articles ready for summarisation or embedding.
• Podcast tracking: episode titles, MP3 links, duration and cover images.
• Job and deal alerts: many job boards and marketplaces publish RSS feeds. Combine Only new items with keyword filters.

Features

• RSS 0.9x / 1.0 (RDF) / 2.0, Atom and podcast (iTunes) feeds, gzip supported.
• Feed auto-discovery: enter blog.example.com and the feed is found from the page's <link rel="alternate"> tags or common paths such as /feed, /rss.xml and /atom.xml.
• Only new items monitoring mode. The first run marks everything currently in the feed as seen, and every later run returns only items published since. Use Monitor name to keep several independent monitors.
• Keyword include/exclude filters (title, summary, content, categories) and date range filters.
• Full content as clean plain text or original HTML. Images from media:content, thumbnails, enclosures and iTunes images.
• Dates normalised to ISO 8601, newest items first, and a per-feed limit.
• One broken feed never fails the whole run. Problems are listed in the SUMMARY record.
• Lightweight HTTP only, with no browser, so runs are fast and cheap.

Input example

{
  "feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "blog.cloudflare.com"],
  "onlyNewItems": true,
  "includeKeywords": ["AI", "security"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "contentFormat": "text"
}

Output example

{
  "title": "Everything we launched during Birthday Week 2026",
  "link": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-2026-wrap-up/",
  "published": "2026-10-05T13:00:00.000Z",
  "author": "Carlos Armada",
  "categories": ["AI", "Product News", "Workers"],
  "summary": "We celebrated our 16th birthday with 46 announcements...",
  "content": "We celebrated our 16th birthday last week by sharing...",
  "imageUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/.../cover.png",
  "enclosure": null,
  "duration": null,
  "guid": "01M45M6M9H2C1A45G0S8EC3KW9",
  "feedTitle": "Cloudflare Blog",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "siteUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "sourceUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/"
}

Podcast items also include enclosure (url, type, length) and duration.

How monitoring works

1. Create a Task with your feeds and Only new items enabled.
2. Add a Schedule, for example every hour.
3. Connect an integration (Slack, email, webhook, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier or n8n) that fires when the run succeeds.

The memory of seen items is stored in your own Apify account (key-value store rss-feed-reader-state). If you delete that store, everything counts as new again.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per run plus a fee per item saved. You never pay for items that were filtered out or already delivered. Set Maximum cost per run to stay within budget, and the Actor stops cleanly at the limit.

Responsible use

Feeds are published by websites specifically for automated reading. The Actor does not log in or bypass any protection. Article texts remain the property of their publishers, so respect copyright and each site's terms when you republish content.

How to use it via API

You can run the Actor from the Apify Console, on a schedule, or from your own code. Get your API token in Apify Console → Settings → Integrations.

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("digitalni.produkty.pro.zivot/rss-feed-reader").call(run_input={
    "feedUrls": [
        "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
    ],
    "onlyNewItems": True
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

JavaScript / Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('digitalni.produkty.pro.zivot/rss-feed-reader').call({
    "feedUrls": [
        "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
    ],
    "onlyNewItems": true
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Integrations and AI agents

• Export results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or open them directly in Google Sheets.
• Connect to Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Google Drive, Airbyte or any webhook to get items from RSS, Atom and podcast feeds into your workflow automatically.
• Use it from AI agents and LLM apps (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, LangChain…) through the Apify MCP server: the agent can call this Actor as a tool.
• Schedule runs (hourly, daily, weekly) to keep data fresh without any code.

FAQ

How much does it cost? $0.003 per run plus $1 per 1,000 feed items. Monitoring 10 feeds every hour with a few new items each costs a few cents per day.

How do I get only new articles? Turn on only-new-items monitoring and schedule the Actor. Each run returns just the items it has not seen before, which is ideal for Slack, email or Google Sheets alerts.

I only have a website, not a feed URL. Will it work? Yes. Enter the website address and the Actor finds the feed automatically.

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All tools with code examples: github.com/Phenixik/apify-actors

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Support

A feed not parsed correctly? Open an issue with the feed URL and we will fix it quickly.