RSS Feed Reader: RSS, Atom and Podcast Feeds to JSON

Read any RSS, Atom or RDF feed and get one clean row per item: title, link, published date, summary, categories, image and the audio or video enclosure of podcast episodes. Paste a feed URL or just a website address. If you give a website, the Actor finds its feed for you.

Built for scheduled monitors: turn on Only new items and each run returns, and charges for, only items you have not received before. Built by Keel & Charter. $0.50 per 1,000 items.

What you get

Field	Example
feed_title, feed_url, site_url	Planet Money, https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml
title, link, guid	Episode or article title, its URL and feed ID
published_at, updated_at	ISO 8601 in UTC, for example 2026-10-14T21:30:18+00:00
summary	Plain text summary with HTML removed
content_text	Full item text when the feed includes it and includeContent is on
categories	Tags or categories from the feed
image_url	Item image or thumbnail when the feed gives one
enclosure_url, enclosure_type, enclosure_length, duration	Podcast audio file, MIME type, size in bytes, duration as given by the feed
comments_url	Comments link when the feed gives one

Author names are never returned.

How to use it

1. Add feed URLs or website addresses to Feeds. For a site such as theverge.com the Actor reads the feed links the page declares, then tries common paths such as /feed and /rss.xml.
2. Optional: add Keywords (whole word match on title, summary and content, any keyword matches), Published within days, and Max items per feed.
3. Run it and export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or schedule it and read new items through the API.
4. For a schedule, turn on Only new items. The Actor remembers what earlier runs returned and skips it, so an hourly check of a quiet feed costs only the $0.00005 start. Give each schedule its own Monitor name so their memories stay separate.

Example input

{
  "feeds": [
    "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml",
    "https://www.theverge.com",
    "https://blog.python.org"
  ],
  "keywords": [
    "python",
    "tariff",
    "ai"
  ],
  "publishedWithinDays": 60,
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 5
}

On Oct 26, 2026 this returned 10 items: 3 Planet Money episodes, 2 Verge stories and 5 Python Insider posts. The two websites were resolved to https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml and https://blog.python.org/rss.xml.

Example output

A row from that run:

{
  "feed_url": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml",
  "feed_title": "Planet Money",
  "site_url": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money",
  "title": "Wanna slow down AI? These biologists can help.",
  "link": "https://www.npr.org/2026/10/14/nx-s1-6002910/ai-scientific-regulation-conference-asilomar",
  "guid": "b297c28a-87e4-4b96-92e0-e64b7b581948",
  "published_at": "2026-10-14T21:30:18+00:00",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-14T21:30:18+00:00",
  "summary": "Fifty years ago, scientists pioneering a terrifying gene-splicing technology figured out a way to collectively hit pause. Can we do it again with AI? ...",
  "content_text": null,
  "categories": [],
  "image_url": "https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop...",
  "enclosure_url": "https://tracking.swap.fm/track/XvDEoI11TR00olTUO8US/prfx.bys...",
  "enclosure_type": "audio/mpeg",
  "enclosure_length": 28012130,
  "duration": "1750",
  "comments_url": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-26T20:41:53.703137+00:00"
}

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription and no separate compute charge:

Event	Price
Feed item returned	$0.0005 per item ($0.50 per 1,000)
Actor start	$0.00005 per run

Example: checking 50 news feeds daily with 20 items each is 1,000 items, about $0.50 per day. Items removed by your keyword or date filters, or skipped by Only new items, are never charged. An hourly monitor of 10 feeds that each post 5 new items a day costs about $0.79 per month (720 starts plus 1,500 items). Set a maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Pricing may change; any change follows Apify's notice rules.

Good to know

• Every request is checked against the site's robots.txt first. Feeds that robots.txt disallows are skipped and logged.
• If a site declares several feeds, only the first is read. Turn on readAllDiscoveredFeeds to read them all.
• Dates are converted to UTC. Items with no date in the feed have published_at empty and are kept unless you set Published within days.
• Only data the feed publishes is returned. The Actor does not open the linked articles.

FAQ

Can it read podcast feeds? Yes. Each episode row includes the audio file URL, MIME type, size and duration.

Does it work with Atom? Yes. RSS 0.9x to 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Atom are supported. JSON Feed is not; if a site also offers an XML feed, give the site address and that feed is found.

How do I get only new items? Schedule the Actor and set Published within days to 1, or keep the last guid you saw and compare.

More from Keel & Charter

• Wayback Machine Domain History
• Bulk WHOIS and Domain Lookup (RDAP, DNS, SPF, DMARC)