RSS Feed Reader: RSS, Atom & JSON Feeds to Clean Data

Paste a list of feed URLs, or just website and blog addresses, and get one clean, consistent row per item: title, link, publish date (ISO 8601, UTC), author, a plain-text summary, categories, the lead image, and the podcast or media enclosure. RSS 0.9x/1.0/2.0, Atom and JSON Feed are all read the same way, so you never deal with three formats again.

No API key, no browser, no proxy: feeds are public, machine-readable files that publishers make for exactly this purpose.

What you can use it for

• News and brand monitoring: watch 200 news sites, blogs and press rooms and keep only items that mention your keywords
• Content aggregation: feed a newsletter, a Slack channel, a Notion database or a website section from many sources at once
• AI and LLM pipelines: pull fresh articles with clean text summaries (or full content) into a RAG index or an agent
• Podcast tracking: list new episodes with their audio enclosure URL across many shows
• Competitor watch: follow the blogs, changelogs and release notes of the companies you track
• Research and archiving: collect dated items from academic, government and industry feeds into one table

Why this one

• Website URLs work too: if you paste https://www.theverge.com instead of a feed address, the feed is found from the page's <link rel="alternate"> tag or common paths (/feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml and more)
• One schema for every format: RSS, Atom and JSON Feed items come out with the same fields
• Clean text: HTML tags and entities stripped from titles and summaries; summary length is yours to set
• Images found for you: media thumbnails, media content, image enclosures, or the first image in the item body
• Filters that save money: keyword filter and "last N days" filter run before anything is charged, and duplicate stories across feeds are dropped
• No start fee beyond a tenth of a cent and a low price per item

Input

Field	What it does	Default
feedUrls	Feed URLs or website/blog URLs, one per line	required
maxItemsPerFeed	Newest items to keep per feed	50
maxAgeDays	Only items published in the last N days	no limit
keywords	Keep items that contain any of these words	keep all
includeContent	Add the full body text as plain text	false
summaryMaxChars	Cut summaries to this length	500
autoDiscover	Find the feed when a URL is a web page	true
dedupe	Drop items whose link was already returned in the run	true
maxResults	Stop after this many items in total	5,000
concurrency	Feeds read in parallel (1–20)	8
timeoutSeconds	Timeout per request	20
userAgent	Custom User-Agent	polite feed reader

Example input:

{
  "feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "https://www.theverge.com", "https://blog.python.org"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "maxAgeDays": 7,
  "keywords": ["python", "linux", "ai"]
}

Output

Field	Meaning
feedUrl, input	The feed that was read and the URL you gave
feedTitle, feedLink, feedType	Feed name, its website, and the format (rss20, atom10, json…)
title, link, guid	Item title, its URL and the feed's own id for it
published, updated	ISO 8601 dates in UTC
author	Author name when the feed gives one
summary	Plain-text summary, cut to summaryMaxChars
content	Full plain-text body (when includeContent is on)
categories	Tags / categories as a list
imageUrl	Lead image of the item
enclosureUrl	Attached media (podcast audio, video, file)

Sample rows from a test run (October 2026):

[
  {"feedTitle": "Hacker News: Front Page", "feedType": "rss20", "title": "Linux 7.3 Released",
   "link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/...", "published": "2026-10-19T07:23:57+00:00", "author": "cjd8",
   "summary": "Article URL: ... Points: 412 # Comments: 233", "categories": []},
  {"feedTitle": "The Verge", "feedType": "atom10", "title": "Video game ownership bill introduced in Congress",
   "published": "2026-10-18T16:27:51+00:00", "imageUrl": "https://platform.theverge.com/...jpg",
   "summary": "A new bill would require ...", "categories": ["Gaming", "Policy"]}
]

How much does it cost?

Pay per result: $0.60 per 1,000 feed items on the Free plan, plus $0.001 per run start, with automatic discounts on paid Apify plans. Platform compute is included. Items dropped by your keyword, date or de-duplication filters are not charged, and a feed that cannot be read costs nothing.

Worked examples:

• A daily digest of 50 blogs, about 10 new items each with maxAgeDays: 1: 500 items = $0.30 a day
• Brand monitoring across 300 news feeds, keyword filter keeps 120 items: $0.07 per run
• A one-off archive pull of 100 feeds × 100 items: 10,000 items = $6.00

FAQ

Some sites have no feed. What happens? The run logs "no RSS/Atom/JSON feed found on this page" for that URL and moves on; nothing is charged for it.

How far back can I go? As far as the feed itself goes. Most feeds publish the newest 10–100 items. For older history, schedule the actor daily and keep the dataset, or use an archive tool.

Can I get only new items since my last run? Use maxAgeDays: 1 on a daily schedule (or 7 on a weekly one). Duplicates inside a run are removed automatically.

Are dates normalised? Yes: every date is converted to ISO 8601 in UTC, whatever format the feed used.

Is it legal? RSS, Atom and JSON feeds are published so that software can read them. This actor requests each feed once per run, with a clear User-Agent, like any feed reader. Respect each publisher's copyright when you republish their content: titles, links and short summaries are the usual fair practice.

Can I schedule it? Yes: save a task with your feed list and run it hourly, daily or weekly, then send new items to Slack, email, Google Sheets or a webhook.

Integrations

Run it through the Apify API, on a schedule, or from Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, webhooks and AI agents (Apify MCP server). Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML.

Changelog

• 0.1 (October 2026): first release: RSS, Atom and JSON Feed; feed auto-discovery; keyword, date and duplicate filters; images and enclosures.