RSS & Atom Feed Reader: Feed Scraper & Monitor, RSS to JSON

What does RSS & Atom Feed Reader do?

RSS & Atom Feed Reader reads and parses the RSS, Atom, RDF and JSON feeds you give it (or a website that advertises one) and returns one clean row per item: title, link, UTC dates, author, summary, full text and media. Scrape feeds once, or monitor them on a schedule. No login, no browser.

Input fields · API · Use it from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor (MCP)

Jump to: Monitor feeds · Fields · Price · How to use · Input · Output · AI agents (MCP) · Limits · FAQ

Try it in one click: the input comes pre-filled with the Rust blog (Atom) and the Django weblog (RSS). That's about 20 items, or roughly $0.02 (20 × $0.001 per item, plus $0.00005 for the run start). Then replace them with the feeds you actually want.

Monitor RSS feeds for new items

RSS & Atom Feed Reader can check your feeds on a schedule and give you only the items added since its last run. Set it up once:

1. Save a task. Fill in Feeds (and any Keywords), turn on Only new items (onlyNewItems: true in the API), then click Save as a new task at the top right of the actor's page. The first run returns everything that matches; later runs return only items the search hasn't returned before.
2. Schedule it. In Apify Console, open Schedules, click Create new, pick the task and set how often it runs (for example every hour, cron 0 * * * *).
3. Send the new items where you work, from the task's Integrations tab:
   • Slack: a message in the channel you choose when a run succeeds (you pick the events and can edit the message).
   • Email: Send results email via Gmail sends the run's results, with the dataset attached.
   • Webhook: a POST to your URL on the ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED event. The payload's resource.defaultDatasetId points to the new items: GET https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<defaultDatasetId>/items?format=json with your API token.
   • Make, Zapier or n8n: each has an Apify step that starts on a finished run and reads its dataset.

A run that finds nothing new returns 0 items and costs only the $0.00005 start fee. Slack and email are sent for every successful run, including a quiet one; to hear only about new items, use the webhook or Make/Zapier/n8n and skip runs whose dataset is empty. Add the run failed event too, so a failed run doesn't go unnoticed. Keep the task's filters fixed: the memory is per feed and per combination of keywords and "published since", so changing them starts a fresh search.

What data does RSS & Atom Feed Reader return?

Field	Example	Notes
title	Announcing Rust 1.99.0
url	https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/18/Rust-1.99.0/	The item's link, made absolute.
published, updated	2026-09-18T00:00:00Z	ISO 8601 UTC; null when the feed gives none.
author	The Release Team	A name; email addresses are removed.
summary	Both the Steering Council and DSF Board have approved...	The feed's summary or description, as plain text.
content	The Rust team is happy to announce...	The full text when the feed includes it, else null.
summaryMarkdown, contentMarkdown		With Also give Markdown on; otherwise null.
categories	[]	As the feed tags the item.
enclosures	[{"url", "type", "length"}]	Attached media: podcast audio, files.
feedTitle, feedUrl, feedFormat	Rust Blog, atom	Which feed the item came from.
id	259c5e9aa94ff6342233	Stable for the same item in the same feed, for deduplication.

Every item has the same fields; the full record is under Output.

How much does it cost to read RSS feeds?

You pay per item returned: $1.00 per 1,000 items, plus $0.00005 each time a run starts. A feed that fails, filtered-out items and items already returned in "only new items" mode are never charged, so a repeat run with nothing new costs only the start fee.

It's cheaper on paid Apify plans: $0.90 per 1,000 items on Starter, $0.80 on Scale and $0.70 on Business. The prices on this page are the Free-plan price, so on a paid plan you pay less than the examples show.

• The example below: 20 items × $0.001 = $0.02, plus the $0.00005 start fee; the repeat run $0.00005.
• A month, for example: 50 feeds checked every hour with only-new on, about 200 new items a day: 6,000 items × $0.001 = $6.00, plus 720 starts × $0.00005 = $0.036: about $6.04.
• Caps: Max results per run in the input, and Maximum cost per run in the run options. It stops cleanly at whichever comes first, and stops fetching as soon as the limit is covered, so a capped run is also a fast one.

How to read RSS feeds into a dataset

1. Open the actor and paste your feed URLs, or website URLs whose page advertises a feed, into Feeds, one per line.
2. Optionally add Keywords or Published since to keep only the items you want.
3. Click Start.
4. Open the Output tab and export the items as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read them through the API.
5. To follow the feeds, save it as a task and schedule it (see Monitor RSS feeds for new items above).

It reads RSS 2.0 (and the older 0.9x), RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom and JSON Feed. When you paste a plain website or blog URL and the page advertises its feed (<link rel="alternate">, as most blogs and news sites do), the actor finds it and reads it.

Example: two blogs, then a re-check

The pre-filled input, with Only new items turned on:

{"feeds": ["https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml", "https://www.djangoproject.com/rss/weblog/"], "onlyNewItems": true}

One of the 20 items (real output from a local run on 2026-09-25; summary shortened):

{
  "id": "290a7b371ab7d8551e90",
  "title": "New Technical Governance Approved",
  "url": "https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/sep/22/new-technical-governance-approved/",
  "published": "2026-09-22T11:00:00Z",
  "updated": null,
  "author": "Tim Schilling and the Steering Council",
  "summary": "Both the Steering Council and DSF Board have approved DEP 19, which implements our new technical governance. ...",
  "content": null,
  "categories": [],
  "enclosures": [],
  "feedTitle": "The Django weblog",
  "feedUrl": "https://www.djangoproject.com/rss/weblog/",
  "feedFormat": "rss"
}

The Rust blog's Atom feed carries each post's full text in content; the Django feed only a summary. Run again straight after, the same input returned 0 items, so only the start fee was charged.

Ready-to-run examples

Each example opens with the input already filled in. Run it as it is, or change the input first.

• Monitor RSS feeds for new posts: Read several RSS or Atom feeds at once and get only the items published since the last run, in one clean format.
• Track keywords across RSS feeds: Watch RSS feeds for posts that mention your keywords, such as your brand, a competitor or a technology.

Input

Field	What it does
Feeds	Feed URLs, or website URLs whose page advertises a feed, one per line.
Keywords	Only items whose title, summary, full text or categories contain one of these words (any case).
Published since	Only items published on or after a date (2026-09-01), a UTC date and time (2026-09-01T12:00:00Z), or a period back from now (7 days, 12 hours, 2 weeks).
Only new items	Only items this search hasn't returned before from the same feed.
Also give Markdown	Adds summaryMarkdown and contentMarkdown.
Max results per run	Cap the total number of items across all feeds.

{
  "feeds": ["https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml", "https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/"],
  "keywords": ["release", "security"],
  "publishedSince": "7 days",
  "onlyNewItems": true,
  "includeMarkdown": false,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Output

Every item has the same fields. Fields the feed doesn't publish are null (or an empty list).

{
  "id": "259c5e9aa94ff6342233",
  "title": "Announcing Rust 1.99.0",
  "url": "https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/18/Rust-1.99.0/",
  "published": "2026-09-18T00:00:00Z",
  "updated": "2026-09-18T00:00:00Z",
  "author": "The Release Team",
  "summary": null,
  "content": "The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.99.0. ...",
  "summaryMarkdown": null,
  "contentMarkdown": null,
  "categories": [],
  "enclosures": [],
  "guid": "https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/18/Rust-1.99.0/",
  "feedTitle": "Rust Blog",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml",
  "feedFormat": "atom",
  "input": "https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-24T18:20:59Z"
}

• id is stable across runs for the same item in the same feed, so you can use it to deduplicate.
• summary is the feed's summary or description; content is the full text when the feed includes it (RSS content:encoded, Atom content, JSON Feed content_html/content_text). Many feeds only publish one of the two.
• enclosures lists attached media as {"url", "type", "length"} (length in bytes, when the feed gives it).
• author is the name the feed gives. Email addresses are removed; an author given only as an email address comes out as null.
• Dates are converted to UTC. A date the feed gives without a time zone is taken as UTC.

Run it on a schedule, or from your own code

• Schedule: save the input as a task and add it to a schedule, as in Monitor RSS feeds for new items above.
• API: fetch a task's latest results with GET https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-tasks/<task id>/runs/last/dataset/items?status=SUCCEEDED&format=csv and your API token (format can also be json or xlsx).
• Webhooks and automation: a webhook when a run succeeds, or Make, Zapier or n8n through Apify's integrations.

Can I use RSS & Atom Feed Reader from an AI agent (MCP)?

Yes, through Apify's MCP server, from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any other MCP client. Add this to your client's MCP configuration (or let the agent find it with the server's actor search); your client signs you in to Apify:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=humble-echidna/rss-feed-reader"
    }
  }
}

To use an Apify API token instead of signing in, add "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>"} next to url.

The agent passes the same input JSON as above. Have it set Max results per run (maxResults) or Published since to keep answers small, and Also give Markdown when the text goes to an LLM.

Who it's for

Anyone who follows many feeds and wants new posts as rows in a dataset, a spreadsheet or an automation instead of a feed-reader app: industry and competitor news tracking, release and security-advisory watching, newsletter curation, podcast episode lists. Schedule it with Only new items and each run returns just the items added since the last one.

Why this one?

• One flat price, no usage bill. You pay per result at the price above and nothing else: no compute, proxy or storage charges on top, apart from the $0.00005 run-start fee, so you know what a run costs before it starts. Results you don't get aren't charged.
• Every common feed format, one shape. RSS, RDF, Atom and JSON Feed all come out with the same fields, dates converted to ISO 8601 UTC, relative links made absolute, and HTML turned into readable text.
• Plain text and Markdown. Summaries and full text come as clean plain text; switch on "Also give Markdown" to get them as Markdown too (headings, lists, links and images kept), ready for an LLM or a RAG pipeline.
• Monitoring built in. "Only new items" returns only what a feed added since your last run. Schedule the actor and you get a new-post alert for any feed. Keyword and "published since" filters narrow it further.
• Pay only for items you get. A feed that fails, filtered-out items and items already returned in "only new items" mode are never charged.
• Polite and safe. It identifies itself honestly (User-Agent HumbleEchidnaApify), follows each site's robots.txt (read once per site per run), including opt-outs aimed at AI crawlers such as GPTBot, CCBot or ClaudeBot, and Crawl-delay, and only requests public web addresses on the standard ports (80 and 443). XML is parsed with entity expansion and external entities switched off.
• Reliable. One failing feed never affects the others in your run. The run log and the RUN_STATS record say exactly which feed had a problem and why.

Limits

• Items without a date are kept by "Published since", because the feed doesn't say they're old.
• "Only new items" is remembered per search: per feed and per combination of keywords and "published since". Two scheduled searches on the same feed never hide each other's items. An item counts as returned only once it is actually in your dataset, so items cut off by your result or cost limit come back on the next run, and a feed that fails to load forgets nothing. The memory lives in a key-value store named rss-feed-reader-seen in your own Apify account; delete it to start over.
• The same feed given twice (say, as a website and as its feed URL) is read and charged once.
• Sizes: a feed (or the page that advertises it) can be up to 10 MB, and up to 5,000 items are read per feed. Each text field is cut at 100,000 characters; the item's link has the rest.
• When a website advertises several feeds, the first one is read (comment feeds last). To read a different one, paste its URL.

FAQ

Why does a feed that used to work now fail or return fewer items?

The site may have moved or changed its feed without notice. The run log names the feed and what went wrong, and every other feed in the run is unaffected. Please open an issue with the input you used.

Why does it say the page doesn't advertise a feed?

Not every site has one, and some only link it visibly instead of advertising it in the page head. Find the feed's own URL (often /feed, /rss or /atom.xml) and paste that.

Why does it say robots.txt disallows the URL?

The site asked automated clients not to fetch it, and this actor respects that. That includes sites that only opt out of AI crawlers (GPTBot, CCBot, ClaudeBot and similar): since this actor's output is often used for AI, it honours those opt-outs too.

Can I get the full article when a feed only has a summary?

Not from the feed itself. Article Extractor opens each article and returns its full text, author and date (see Related actors).

Is it legal to read RSS feeds with it?

It reads feeds that site owners publish on purpose for feed readers and other software, from the URLs you give it. It uses no login and doesn't get around any access control. Feed content stays its publisher's: check each feed's terms before you republish what you collect.

Related actors

Actor	Use it when
Article Extractor	A feed gives only a summary (like the Django feed above): it opens each article and returns the full text, author and date. It finds feeds itself and has its own only-new mode, so for full articles you can use it on its own.
Audio & Video Transcriber	You want podcast feeds' episodes as transcripts and captions.
Website & Page to Markdown for RAG and LLMs	You want linked pages that aren't articles, as Markdown for an LLM.

Feedback and support

Found a bug, or need a field or feed format that isn't here? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the input you used.

Versions

Current version: 1.0. See the Changelog tab for what changed in each version.