Article Extractor & RSS Feed Scraper: Diffbot Alternative, with RSS

A blog scraper and article extractor: get clean news and blog articles with headline, author, date and full text, as clean Markdown, the fields Diffbot's Article API gives, priced per article. Pages that fail or aren't articles are free, and there's no plan.

News article extractor use cases

• Pull the latest posts from a list of news sites or blogs every morning.
• Keep only what's new: "Only newer than: 24 hours".
• Give an AI agent the full text of an article, with its date and author.
• Feed articles into a RAG index, a newsletter or a summary.

What you get for each article

In 16 articles from our test runs (October 15 to 17, 2026), all 16 had a publish date and a lead image, 5 had authors and 2 had tags. A field the site doesn't publish is empty. From a site or section page it finds the newest articles itself, using the site's own feed first. It obeys robots.txt and paces its requests. $0.002 per article, and pages that fail or aren't articles are free. It works for people and for AI agents through Apify's MCP server.

It reads the HTML the site sends, so most news sites and blogs work. A page that draws its text with JavaScript, or sits behind a paywall or login, gives an error or a short text.

Input

Field	What to put
Article URLs	Articles to extract, one per line. Each one is extracted, whatever Max articles says.
Start URLs	A home page, section page or RSS feed, like https://blog.cloudflare.com/. The newest articles on it are extracted.
Max articles	The most articles to take from the start URLs. Default 20.
Only newer than	A date like 2026-10-01, or a span like 7 days or 24 hours. Older articles are skipped and not charged.
Add plain text	Off by default. On: a text field with the article as plain text, next to the Markdown.
Proxy	Off by default. Turn on Apify Proxy for a site that blocks cloud servers.

Give article URLs, start URLs or both. Example:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://blog.cloudflare.com/"],
  "maxArticles": 10,
  "newerThan": "7 days"
}

Output

One row per article. This one came from a test run on October 15, 2026 (Markdown cut short here):

{
  "type": "article",
  "url": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8wy9veedgygo",
  "requestedUrl": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8wy9veedgygo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss",
  "foundOn": null,
  "title": "Starlink: Musk says US government may be behind slowdown of Ukraine drone speeds",
  "authors": ["Tiffany Wertheimer"],
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-14T20:17:09.546Z",
  "modifiedAt": "2026-10-14T20:55:24.210Z",
  "description": "Ukraine says Starlink access has improved but it is still facing speed limits which are disrupting its battlefield \"missions\".",
  "siteName": "BBC News",
  "language": "en-GB",
  "image": "https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/branded_news/1200/cpsprodpb/9f7e/live/76dbc1b0-c848-11f1-94ec-7f952cae1636.jpg",
  "tags": [],
  "section": "Europe",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8wy9veedgygo",
  "isArticle": true,
  "markdown": "**Elon Musk has suggested that the US government may be behind restrictions on the speed at which some of Ukraine's weapons can travel...**\n\nStarlink is a vital tool allowing Kyiv to guide drones...",
  "wordCount": 734,
  "statusCode": 200,
  "extractedAt": "2026-10-15T04:41:12.000Z"
}

• The body comes from Mozilla's Readability, the engine behind Firefox's reader view. Menus, ads, related links and images are removed; headings, lists, tables, quotes and links stay.
• Authors, dates, tags and the image come from the site's own data (schema.org, Open Graph and article tags). A field the site doesn't publish is empty or null.
• An article URL you gave that failed (a 404, not a web page, no article text, or disallowed by robots.txt) has error instead, and isn't charged.

The run's SUMMARY record counts articles saved and failed, and links skipped because they weren't articles, were older than your date, or robots.txt disallows them.

Price

• $0.002 per article saved, so $2 per 1,000.
• That's the price on Apify's free plan. On a paid Apify plan it's less: $1.80 per 1,000 articles on Starter, $1.60 on Scale and $1.40 on Business, the "from" price at the top of this page.
• Free: failed URLs, pages that aren't articles, articles older than your date filter, and pages robots.txt disallows.
• You can set a maximum charge for a run. It stops when it's reached and keeps what it already saved.

Good to know

• Finding articles. From a start page it takes the links that look like articles (a date or a headline in the address), with the site's RSS or Atom feed first, and keeps only pages that are articles. It reads the page you give, not the whole site.
• Polite. It reads each site's robots.txt and skips what it disallows, and asks one site for one page a second. Different sites run side by side.
• Your use of the articles. Articles belong to their publishers. Make sure you have the right to use what you extract, for example for your own reading, research or analysis, and check a site's terms before you republish anything.

Use it from an AI agent

The Actor works through Apify's MCP server like any Store Actor. An agent can find it, read its input and call it. To read one article, pass it in articleUrls; that usually finishes within the MCP call's wait. The MCP call waits 30 seconds by default (45 at most). A bigger run takes longer, so the call returns the run's status and dataset ID, and the agent reads the rows with get-dataset-items.

FAQ

How do I get the latest articles from a news site or blog? Put the home page, a section page or its RSS feed in Start URLs. It finds the newest articles itself, 20 by default.

Can I get only new articles each day? Yes. Set "Only newer than" to 24 hours and schedule the run.

What do I get for each article? Headline, authors, publish date, tags, lead image and the full text as clean Markdown.

What if a page isn't an article? It's skipped and costs nothing.

More tools from us

• AI Brand Mention Checker: is your brand named by ChatGPT and Gemini, and who comes first.
• Google Ads Transparency Scraper: every Google, YouTube and Display ad a competitor runs.
• Website to Markdown Crawler: a whole site as clean Markdown for LLMs and RAG.
• Website Screenshot: full page or mobile screenshots of any URL, PNG or JPEG.
• Image Downloader: every image on a page, full size, in one ZIP.

Questions or problems

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab. I read them. If it saves you time, a short review helps others find it.