RSS Feed Reader & News Monitor: Parse RSS, Atom and JSON Feeds to JSON

Read any number of RSS, Atom and JSON feeds and get clean, consistent JSON, CSV or Excel. Don't know the feed URL? Paste the website or blog address and the Actor finds the feed for you. Schedule it with only-new-items mode to monitor news, blogs, podcasts, releases, job boards or competitors, and pipe new items to Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make or your own API.

What you can use it for

• News monitoring: watch dozens of news sites and blogs and get only new articles that mention your brand or keywords.
• Slack, Telegram or email alerts: schedule hourly runs with only new items and send the results through a webhook or Zapier/Make.
• AI newsletters and summaries: collect the week's posts with full article text, then summarize them with an LLM.
• Competitor and release tracking: follow product blogs, changelogs and GitHub release feeds.
• Podcast data: episode titles, dates and audio enclosure URLs from podcast feeds.

How to use it

1. Paste feed URLs or plain website URLs under Feed URLs (the feed is discovered automatically).
2. Turn on Only new items if you'll run it on a schedule.
3. Add keyword or date filters if you want.
4. Click Start, then create a schedule and an integration for alerts.

Why this feed reader

• Every format: RSS 0.9x / 1.0 (RDF) / 2.0, Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed 1.0/1.1, normalized into one schema.
• Feed discovery: works with plain website URLs (<link rel="alternate"> tags, then common paths like /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml).
• Only new items: remembers what each feed contained last time and returns only what's new. Unchanged feeds are skipped cheaply with ETag / Last-Modified conditional requests. Use separate monitor names for separate schedules.
• Filters: keywords to include or exclude (title, summary, content, author, categories) and a published after date, absolute (2026-10-01) or relative (24 hours, 7 days).
• Full article text (optional): opens each item's link and extracts the main text as Markdown, ready for LLMs, summaries or RAG.
• Merged output feed: saves all returned items as one filtered RSS 2.0, Atom or JSON Feed file (OUTPUT_FEED in the key-value store). It works as a simple feed aggregator / feed generator.
• Podcasts and media: enclosures (audio/video URL, type, size) and thumbnail images included.
• Cheap and polite: plain HTTP, no browser, 256 MB memory. Respects robots.txt, never logs in, refuses private or internal addresses.

Input example

{
  "feedUrls": [{"url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"}, {"url": "https://blog.python.org"}, {"url": "https://github.blog/feed/"}],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "onlyNewItems": true,
  "includeKeywords": ["release", "security"],
  "publishedAfter": "7 days",
  "fetchFullText": false,
  "outputFeedFormat": "rss"
}

Output (one item per feed entry)

{
  "inputUrl": "https://blog.python.org/",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.python.org/rss.xml",
  "feedTitle": "Python Insider", "feedFormat": "rss20", "feedLanguage": null,
  "title": "Python 3.16.0 alpha 1 is now available",
  "link": "https://blog.python.org/2026/10/python-3160-alpha-1-is-now-available/",
  "guid": "https://blog.python.org/2026/10/python-3160-alpha-1-is-now-available/", "itemId": "288a44c8c89ab69ffd52",
  "published": "2026-10-13T00:00:00+00:00", "updated": null,
  "author": "Savannah Ostrowski", "summary": "The first developer preview of Python 3.16 is ready for testing. ...",
  "categories": ["releases"], "image": null,
  "enclosures": [],
  "fullText": "# Python 3.16.0 alpha 1 is now available\n\n...",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-17T07:13:08+00:00"
}

Feeds that fail (not found, not a feed, blocked by robots.txt) produce a single row with inputUrl and error, and are not charged.

Scheduled monitoring in 3 steps

1. Add your feeds and turn on Only new items since the last run.
2. Create a schedule (e.g. every hour) in Apify Console.
3. Add an integration (Slack, email, webhook, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make) that fires when the run succeeds.

Limits

• Only reads what sites publish as feeds, plus the linked article page when full text is on. No logins, paywalls or JavaScript rendering.
• Feeds usually contain only the latest 10 to 100 entries. Older items are not available from the feed itself.
• Use the content in line with each publisher's terms and copyright.

Pricing

Pay per event, no monthly rent:

• $0.0005 per feed item returned
• $0.001 per full article text (optional)

Example	Cost
1,000 feed items	$0.50
1,000 items with full article text	$1.50
Hourly monitor of 20 feeds, about 200 new items a day, for 30 days	$3.04

Errors, skipped items and unchanged feeds are free.

You can set a maximum cost per run in the run options; the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached. New to Apify? The free plan includes $5 of platform credit every month, so you can try this Actor at no cost.

API, integrations and AI agents (MCP)

Run it from your own code with the Apify API and get the results in one call:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/manageable_gully~rss-feed-reader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @input.json

from apify_client import ApifyClient
run = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>").actor("manageable_gully/rss-feed-reader").call(run_input={...})

• No-code: use the Apify app in n8n, Make or Zapier ("Run Actor", then "Get dataset items"), or send results to Google Sheets, Slack or a webhook.
• AI agents (MCP): add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=manageable_gully/rss-feed-reader to Claude, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP client and the agent can call this Actor as a tool.
• Schedules: run it hourly, daily or weekly from Apify Console.

FAQ

What if a website has no RSS feed? The Actor first looks for feeds linked from the page and at common paths (/feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml). If none exists, that URL gets an error row and is not charged. For pages without feeds, use Web Page to Markdown instead.

Can I build my own combined RSS feed? Yes. The merged, filtered feed is saved as RSS 2.0, Atom or JSON Feed (OUTPUT_FEED in the key-value store), so you can subscribe to it from any reader.

Can AI agents use it? Yes. It is available as a tool through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=manageable_gully/rss-feed-reader) and the Apify API, and it returns structured JSON that agents can read directly.

More tools from WebIntel Tools

• Web Page to Markdown: clean Markdown and RAG chunks from any URL, for LLMs
• Product Hunt Scraper: daily, weekly and monthly Product Hunt launches with websites
• Google Jobs Scraper: Google for Jobs listings with salaries and apply links
• PDF & Image OCR Extractor: PDFs and images to text, Markdown and tables (incl. Hebrew/Arabic)

See all WebIntel Tools Actors.

Made by WebIntel Tools. This Actor was built and is maintained with AI assistance. Report issues on the Issues tab; they are monitored daily.