RSS Feed Reader & Monitor – RSS, Atom & JSON Feed to JSON

Turn any RSS, Atom, RDF or JSON Feed into clean, structured JSON — or just paste a website URL and the feed is found for you. Monitor blogs, news sites, podcasts, release notes, job boards and newsletters; get only the new items on every scheduled run; filter by keyword and date; export to JSON, CSV, Excel or straight into Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets or your AI agent.

• ✅ All feed formats: RSS 0.9x/2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed 1.0/1.1, with namespaces (content:encoded, Dublin Core, Media RSS, iTunes podcast tags)
• ✅ Feed auto-discovery: give https://blog.example.com and the Actor reads <link rel="alternate">, page links and common paths (/feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml …)
• ✅ Monitor mode: onlyNewItems remembers what it has already returned and outputs only new posts — perfect for hourly/daily schedules and alerts
• ✅ Normalized items: the same fields for every format — title, link, published date (ISO 8601, UTC), author, categories, summary, full text, HTML, image, podcast enclosures and duration
• ✅ Filters: include/exclude keywords, "published after" (date or "24 hours", "7 days"), max items per feed, dedup across feeds
• ✅ Robust: handles redirects, gzip, non-UTF-8 encodings (ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252), relative links, broken dates and huge feeds; failed feeds produce a clear error row instead of crashing the run
• ✅ Cheap and fair: pay only for items actually returned — $0.50 per 1,000 items, errors are free

What can I use it for?

Use case	How
News & brand monitoring	Schedule hourly with onlyNewItems + includeKeywords: ["your brand", "competitor"] and send new items to Slack/email via an Apify integration
Content aggregation / newsletters	Read 100s of blogs in one run, dedupe, and export a daily digest
AI agents & RAG	Feed contentText (clean full text) into your LLM, vector DB or summariser
Podcast data	Episode titles, dates, audio URLs (enclosures) and durations — pair with our Audio Transcriber to turn episodes into text
Release notes & changelogs	Follow GitHub releases (/releases.atom), product blogs and status pages
SEO & research	Track what competitors publish and how often; find a site's feeds automatically

How much does it cost?

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing:

Event	Price
Feed item returned	$0.0005 ($0.50 per 1,000 items)

• Feeds that fail (404, timeouts, not a feed) are not charged.
• With onlyNewItems, you only pay for genuinely new items — a schedule that checks 50 feeds every hour typically costs a few cents a day.
• Example: 20 blogs × 10 newest posts = 200 items = $0.10.
• Comparable feed readers in the Apify Store charge around $0.00115 per item or $0.002 per feed (October 2026). Apify free-plan credits cover thousands of items each month.

Set Maximum cost per run in the run options to cap spending; the Actor stops cleanly when the limit is reached.

Input

Field	Description
urls	Feed URLs or website URLs (required)
maxItemsPerFeed	Newest items per feed (default 50, 0 = all)
onlyNewItems	Monitor mode: return only items not seen in previous runs
stateStoreName	Named key-value store for monitor state (use different names for independent monitors)
publishedAfter	2026-10-01 or 24 hours / 7 days
includeKeywords / excludeKeywords	Whole-word, case-insensitive filters over title, summary, text and categories
includeContent	Add contentText and contentHtml (default on)
discoverFeeds	Find feeds on normal web pages (default on)
useAllDiscoveredFeeds	Read every advertised feed of a site (max 10), not just the main one
dedupeAcrossFeeds	Skip items whose link already appeared in another feed

Example:

{
  "urls": ["https://blog.cloudflare.com", "https://github.blog/feed/", "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "onlyNewItems": true,
  "includeKeywords": ["AI", "security"]
}

Output

One dataset row per item:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "input": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "feedTitle": "Cloudflare Blog",
  "feedFormat": "rss",
  "siteUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/",
  "itemId": "3f1c0e9a2b7d4c51",
  "title": "Everything we launched during Birthday Week 2026",
  "url": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-2026-wrap-up/",
  "published": "2026-10-05T13:00:00.000Z",
  "author": "Carlos Armada",
  "categories": ["Birthday Week", "Product News"],
  "summary": "Short plain-text summary…",
  "image": "https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/…/hero.png",
  "enclosures": [],
  "durationSecs": null,
  "wordCount": 2140,
  "contentText": "Full article text when the feed includes it…",
  "contentHtml": "<p>…</p>"
}

Feeds that cannot be read produce a row with status: "error", an errorCode (HTTP_404, NO_FEED_FOUND, NOT_A_FEED, INVALID_XML, TIMEOUT, DNS_ERROR, TLS_ERROR, TOO_LARGE, INVALID_URL) and a message. The run summary (key-value store record OUTPUT) lists every feed read: URL, title, format, last update, items in feed and items returned — handy as a feed finder for a list of websites.

Dataset views: Items, Podcast / media enclosures and Errors. Download as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or read via the Apify API.

Monitoring new items on a schedule

1. Set onlyNewItems: true (and optionally keywords).
2. Create a Schedule in Apify Console (e.g. every hour).
3. Add an integration (Slack, email, webhook, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets) on "Run succeeded" — each run's dataset contains only new items.

The first monitor run returns the items currently in each feed and remembers them; later runs return only items that appeared since. Use a different stateStoreName per monitor.

Use it from code or AI agents

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pinkish_armada~rss-feed-reader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["https://github.blog/feed/"],"maxItemsPerFeed":5,"includeContent":false}'

The Actor is also callable as a tool from the Apify MCP server (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT and other MCP clients), so an agent can ask "what did these blogs publish this week?".

FAQ

Does it scrape websites? No. It reads the public feeds that publishers provide specifically for machine consumption. For feed discovery it loads the page you give it once to find the advertised feed link.

Is it legal? Feeds are published so readers and apps can consume them. Respect each publisher's copyright: use full content for personal reading, monitoring, analysis or internal use, and link back to the original when republishing excerpts.

Why are some items missing contentText? Many feeds only include a summary. The Actor returns whatever the publisher provides; the url points to the full article.

Can it read password-protected or paywalled feeds? No — only publicly accessible feeds.

Which dates are used? published is the item's publish date (falling back to its updated date), normalized to ISO 8601 UTC. Feeds with non-standard time zones are handled.

What if a site has no feed? You get a NO_FEED_FOUND row (not charged). For sites without feeds, try our Sitemap URL Extractor to list all pages.

Related Actors

• Audio & Video Transcriber — transcribe podcast episodes found by this Actor
• Sitemap URL Extractor — list every URL of a website from its sitemaps
• PDF to Markdown / Office to Markdown — convert documents for LLMs and RAG

Support

Found a feed that doesn't parse correctly? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with the feed URL — fixes are usually shipped within a day.