RSS Feed Monitor: New Items Only, Keyword Alerts

Read any number of RSS and Atom feeds and get back only the items you have not seen yet. Filter by keyword or date, run it on a schedule, and push new items to Slack, Google Sheets, email or your own API through Apify integrations.

What it does

• Reads RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Atom and returns one clean row per item: title, link, publication date, summary, categories and enclosure (podcast audio, images).
• "Only new items" mode remembers what each feed has already returned, so a scheduled run delivers just the fresh items.
• Keyword filters: keep items that mention any of your keywords, drop items with excluded words.
• Date filter: ignore anything published before a given date.
• Polite by default: identifies itself with its own user agent, respects robots.txt and reports skipped feeds in the run summary.
• No personal data by default: author names are only included when you switch them on.

Typical uses

• Brand and competitor monitoring across news sites and blogs.
• Keyword alerts ("pricing", "acquisition", your product name) delivered to Slack every hour.
• Release and changelog tracking for the tools you depend on.
• Feeding new articles into an LLM, RAG index or newsletter pipeline.
• Podcast episode tracking through enclosure URLs.

How "Only new items" works

1. The first run with a given State name returns every item currently in each feed and remembers them.
2. Every later run returns only items whose ID (the feed's guid/id, or the link) was not returned before.
3. Different monitors can use different state names, so they never interfere.

Schedule the Actor (for example every hour) from the Schedules tab and connect an integration to receive the new items.

Input

Field	Type	Description
feedUrls	Array	RSS or Atom feed URLs. Required.
onlyNew	Boolean	Return only items not seen in previous runs. Default false.
stateKey	String	Name of the memory used by onlyNew. Default default.
keywords	Array	Keep items whose title, summary or categories contain any of these.
excludeKeywords	Array	Drop items that contain any of these.
publishedAfter	String	Keep items published on or after this date (2026-01-31).
maxItemsPerFeed	Integer	Maximum items saved per feed per run. 0 = no limit. Default 50.
includeContent	Boolean	Add the full item text as plain text. Default false.
includeAuthor	Boolean	Add the author name. Default false.
respectRobotsTxt	Boolean	Skip feeds disallowed by robots.txt. Default true.

Example

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://blog.apify.com/rss/",
    "https://crawlee.dev/blog/atom.xml"
  ],
  "onlyNew": true,
  "stateKey": "dev-tools-news",
  "keywords": ["release", "pricing"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20
}

Output

One dataset row per item:

{
  "feedUrl": "https://crawlee.dev/blog/atom.xml",
  "feedTitle": "Crawlee Blog",
  "title": "Crawlee 3.x released",
  "link": "https://crawlee.dev/blog/crawlee-3-x",
  "guid": "https://crawlee.dev/blog/crawlee-3-x",
  "publishedAt": "2026-11-05T16:00:00.000Z",
  "summary": "Plain-text summary of the item, up to 1,000 characters.",
  "categories": ["release"],
  "enclosureUrl": null,
  "matchedKeywords": ["release"],
  "isNew": true,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-11-12T14:33:01.996Z"
}

A run summary (feeds read, failed, skipped by robots.txt, items found and saved) is stored in the key-value store under SUMMARY and printed in the log.

Pricing

You pay per item saved to the dataset; the current rate is on the pricing tab. Items filtered out, already seen, or from feeds that failed or were skipped are not charged. Use maxItemsPerFeed to cap the cost of a run.

FAQ

Where do I find a site's feed URL? Most blogs and news sites publish one at /feed, /rss, /rss.xml or /atom.xml. WordPress sites use /feed/. Look for an RSS icon or a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> tag in the page source.

A feed shows "Disallowed by robots.txt". Why? The website asks automated clients not to fetch that URL, and this Actor respects that by default. Use another source for that site, or turn the option off only if you have the site owner's permission.

Why did the first "only new" run return everything? Nothing had been seen yet. From the second run on you get only fresh items.

Does it scrape full articles? No. It returns what the publisher puts in the feed. Turn on includeContent to get the full text when the feed includes it.