RSS Feed Scraper

RSS Feed Scraper fetches and parses any RSS 2.0 or Atom feed into clean, structured JSON. Get titles, links, descriptions, authors, publication dates, GUIDs, and categories from news sites, blogs, podcasts — any feed on the web.

Built on the Apify platform, it gives you API access, scheduling, dataset export, webhooks, and integrations with Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and more.

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What does RSS Feed Scraper do?

This Actor takes any RSS or Atom feed URL, fetches the raw XML, parses it with feedparser, and outputs clean structured JSON. Each item includes title, link, HTML-stripped description, author, publication date (normalized to ISO 8601), GUID, and categories. It handles both RSS 2.0 and Atom formats automatically.

Why use RSS Feed Scraper?

• Works with any feed — RSS 2.0, Atom, JSON Feed. Just pass a URL.
• Structured output — No raw XML to parse. Get clean JSON fields out of the box.
• Cost-effective — First 10 results free per run. After that, $0.01 per additional result.
• Apify-powered — Schedule recurring runs, export to CSV/JSON/Excel, pipe data into your workflows via API or webhooks.

Use Cases

How to fetch and parse any RSS feed into JSON

Enter any RSS or Atom feed URL and get clean structured JSON with titles, links, descriptions, authors, publication dates, and categories. HTML is stripped from descriptions for clean text output.

How to monitor multiple news sources

Schedule daily runs of multiple RSS feeds (BBC News, TechCrunch, Hacker News RSS). Aggregate results into a single dataset for a personalized news dashboard.

How to build a content aggregation pipeline

Use the RSS scraper as the first step in a content pipeline. Feed the JSON output into your LLM for summarization, sentiment analysis, or keyword extraction.

How to track podcast episodes via RSS

Most podcasts publish an RSS feed with episode titles, descriptions, and publication dates. Use the scraper to get the latest episodes from any podcast feed.

How to use RSS Feed Scraper

1. Create a free Apify account
2. Go to the RSS Feed Scraper Actor page
3. Click Try or go to Input tab
4. Paste your feed URL (e.g. https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml)
5. Set your desired Max Results
6. Click Run — results appear in the Dataset tab in seconds

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
feed_url	string	✅ yes	—	URL of the RSS or Atom feed
max_results	integer	no	25	Max items to return (max 200)

Example JSON input:

{
    "feed_url": "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
    "max_results": 25
}

Output

Each item in the dataset has these fields:

{
    "title": "UK inflation rate rises above 3% for first time in 2025",
    "link": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y6v7w8x9y0",
    "description": "The UK inflation rate has risen above 3% for the first time this year...",
    "author": "BBC News",
    "pub_date": "2025-06-15T08:30:00+00:00",
    "guid": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y6v7w8x9y0",
    "categories": ["Business", "Economy", "UK"]
}

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, XML, or RSS from the Apify Console.

Data fields

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Item title
link	string	URL to the full article/post
description	string	Summary or description (HTML stripped)
author	string or null	Author name if available
pub_date	string or null	Publication date in ISO 8601 format
guid	string or null	Unique identifier
categories	array of strings	Category tags

Pricing / Cost estimation

How much does it cost to scrape an RSS feed?

• First 10 results per run are free
• Each additional result costs $0.01 (charged via Actor.charge())
• Example: scraping 50 items costs $0.40 (40 charged items)

Runs typically complete in under 10 seconds, keeping platform compute costs minimal.

Tips & advanced options

• Set max_results precisely — The first 10 are free, so a run of 10 costs $0, while 11 costs $0.01.
• Use the Apify API — Trigger runs programmatically and fetch results via https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-runs/{runId}/dataset/items
• Schedule recurring scrapes — Set a daily or hourly schedule in the Apify Console to monitor feeds.
• Combine with other Actors — Pipe feed output into translation, AI summarization, or data storage Actors.

FAQ

Does this web scrape the article content?

No. It only fetches the feed XML/JSON, which contains headlines, summaries, and metadata. It does not scrape the full article pages.

Is this legal?

Yes. RSS and Atom feeds are explicitly designed for programmatic access and syndication. You should still respect the feed publisher's terms of service and any robots.txt rules.

What feed formats are supported?

RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom, and JSON Feed.

How do I find a site's RSS feed?

Look for the RSS/feed icon, check the page source for <link type="application/rss+xml">, or try common paths like /feed/, /rss/, or /index.xml.

Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the GitHub repository.

Need a custom solution? Contact us for tailored scraping or data processing Actors.

Disclaimer: This Actor is provided as-is. The developer is not responsible for how you use this tool. Always respect the target website's terms of service and applicable laws.