RSS Feed Reader: RSS & Atom to JSON/CSV, New Items Only

Paste in RSS, Atom or JSON Feed links. You get one clean row per item with title, link, date, author and summary. Turn on "only new items" and schedule the Actor, and each run returns only what is new since the last run, so it works as a simple feed monitor. It asks servers whether a feed has changed before downloading it again, and it respects robots.txt. A feed that fails or hasn't changed costs nothing beyond the small run fee.

Quick start for AI agents and API users

• What it does: Read RSS, Atom and JSON feeds and return clean items.
• When to use it: To get the latest posts from blogs, news or podcasts, or set onlyNewItems on a schedule to monitor feeds.
• Example input (the form's prefill; it finishes in under a minute):

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/",
    "https://blog.apify.com/rss/"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "onlyNewItems": false
}

• Example output: one real dataset row from run lUlcDde6poQDPs3HA (2026-10-23), with long fields shortened and empty fields left out. Fields not shown are listed in the output table below.

{
  "feedUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/",
  "feedTitle": "NASA",
  "id": "45f6085a558e29a12d82",
  "guid": "https://www.nasa.gov/?p=1058847",
  "title": "NASA, Virginia Launch Power Partnership for Energy Security",
  "link": "https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/nasa-power-energy-partnership/",
  "published": "2026-10-23T17:50:21Z",
  "updated": "2026-10-23T17:50:21Z",
  "author": "Holly Rink",
  "summary": "NASA is helping to foster long-term energy security in Virginia. NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is partnering with ...",
  "categories": [
    "Langley Research Center"
  ],
  "feedFormat": "rss20",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-23T18:55:25Z"
}

• Cost (pay per event, Free-plan prices): Actor run started $0.001; Feed parsed $0.002. Failed items are not charged.
• From an AI agent: with the Apify MCP server, call call-actor with actor phaux/rss-feed-reader, or load it as its own tool with https://mcp.apify.com?tools=phaux/rss-feed-reader. Read results with get-dataset-items.

What does this RSS feed reader do?

• Reads many feeds in one run (up to 2,000): RSS 0.9x/1.0/2.0, Atom 0.3/1.0 and JSON Feed 1.x, including podcast feeds.
• Normalises every item to the same fields: title, link, published and updated (ISO 8601 UTC), author, plain-text summary, categories, enclosures (podcast audio, images) and an optional full contentHtml.
• Only new items: with onlyNewItems it remembers what it returned before (in a named key-value store) and returns only new items. Schedule it hourly or daily for a feed monitor, and connect the output to Slack, email, Google Sheets or a webhook with Apify integrations.
• Conditional requests: sends If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since, so an unchanged feed is a tiny 304 response and is not charged.
• Filters: publishedAfter date and maxItemsPerFeed.
• Polite: robots.txt, one request at a time per host with a delay, honest User-Agent, no proxies; an HTTP 429 stops requests to that host.

Why use it?

• Cheap for schedules: a $0.001 run fee plus $0.002 per feed that returned items. Hourly monitoring of 10 feeds costs at most about $15 a month, and less when feeds don't change.
• Failures are free: broken, blocked, unchanged or empty feeds are not charged; each is listed in FEEDS_REPORT with the reason.
• Clean, consistent output across feed formats, ready for CSV/Excel, databases or LLM pipelines.

Use cases: news and blog monitoring, competitor and press-release tracking, podcast episode lists, content aggregation, alerting on new posts, and feeding new articles into AI summaries.

How to use it

1. Add your feed URLs under Feed URLs.
2. Set Max items per feed. For monitoring, switch on Only new items and add a schedule (Console → Schedules).
3. Run it and export the Items dataset, or connect an integration.

Input example

{
  "feedUrls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/", "https://blog.apify.com/rss/"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "onlyNewItems": false
}

Field	Default	Description
feedUrls	—	RSS, Atom or JSON Feed URLs. Empty = small example.
maxItemsPerFeed	50	Newest items per feed.
onlyNewItems	false	Return only items not returned in earlier runs.
stateStoreName	rss-feed-reader-state	Named store for the seen-items state (one per monitor).
publishedAfter	—	Only items published on/after this date.
includeContent	false	Add the full content HTML when the feed has it.
maxSummaryLength	1000	Plain-text summary length (0 = none).
requestIntervalSecs	1	Delay between requests to one host.
maxConcurrency	10	Feeds fetched in parallel (across hosts).

Output example

{
  "feedUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/feed/",
  "feedTitle": "NASA",
  "id": "a54d1aa6de416bf8dfb9",
  "guid": "https://science.nasa.gov/directorates/smd/faster-to-science-a-letter-to-the-science-community/",
  "title": "Faster to Science: A Letter to the Science Community",
  "link": "https://science.nasa.gov/directorates/smd/faster-to-science-a-letter-to-the-science-community/",
  "published": "2026-10-22T00:00:16Z",
  "updated": "2026-10-22T00:00:16Z",
  "author": null,
  "summary": "NASA Science wants to deliver science faster, so we're changing how we compete and select missions. ...",
  "categories": ["Science Mission Directorate"],
  "enclosures": null,
  "feedFormat": "rss20",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-22T01:13:00Z"
}

FEEDS_REPORT (key-value store) has one entry per feed: ok, unchanged (304), no_new_items, empty or failed with an error code (robots_disallowed, http_error, not_a_feed, rate_limited, dns_error, timeout, not_supported ...).

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor run started (once per run)	$0.001
Feed parsed (per feed that returned at least one item)	$0.002

Example: one run over 25 feeds that all have items costs $0.001 + 25 × $0.002 = $0.051. Feeds that are unchanged, empty, have no new items or fail are free.

Notes

• Output contains only what each feed publishes; the Actor does not open or scrape the linked articles.
• Google News RSS is not supported (its robots.txt disallows /rss).
• Some publishers allow their feeds for personal use only. You are responsible for following each feed's terms.