RSS & Atom Feed Reader - Monitor Any Feed at Scale

Monitor any RSS, Atom, or JSON feed at scale — podcasts, news sites, blogs, release feeds.

Point it at a list of feed URLs and get back clean structured records with titles, authors, full content, featured images, categories, podcast enclosures and publication dates. Format is auto-detected — mix RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed sources in the same run.

What you get

• Auto-detects feed format — RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, JSON Feed 1.0/1.1 in the same run
• Full content extraction — titles, HTML body, short description, author name + email
• Featured images — pulled from media:thumbnail, media:content, enclosures or inline <img> tags
• Podcast enclosures — episode MP3/M4A URLs, file size and MIME type preserved
• Categories & tags — every tag the publisher ships
• Date filtering — only return items newer than a given ISO date
• Per-feed summary — extra record per feed with item count and latest/oldest dates
• Batch processing — hundreds of feeds per run, one bad feed never breaks the batch

Use with AI Agents (MCP)

Connect this actor to any MCP-compatible AI client — Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, Cursor, VS Code, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom agents.

Apify MCP server URL:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=santamaria-automations/rss-feed-reader

Example prompt once connected:

"Use rss-feed-reader to process data with rss feed reader. Return results as a table."

Clients that support dynamic tool discovery (Claude.ai, VS Code) will receive the full input schema automatically via add-actor.

Example output

News article (RSS 2.0)

{
  "type": "feed_item",
  "feed_url": "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
  "feed_title": "BBC News",
  "feed_type": "rss",
  "feed_language": "en-gb",
  "item_title": "Global markets rally on rate cut hopes",
  "item_link": "https://www.bbc.com/news/business-12345678",
  "item_guid": "https://www.bbc.com/news/business-12345678",
  "item_published": "2026-04-07T08:14:00Z",
  "item_description": "Stocks in Europe and Asia jumped after...",
  "item_content": "<p>Stocks in Europe and Asia jumped...</p>",
  "item_image": "https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/abc.jpg",
  "item_categories": ["Business", "Markets"],
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-07T09:00:00Z"
}

Podcast episode (with enclosure)

{
  "type": "feed_item",
  "feed_title": "The Changelog",
  "item_title": "Episode 512: Building resilient systems",
  "item_link": "https://changelog.com/podcast/512",
  "item_author": "Adam Stacoviak <adam@changelog.com>",
  "item_published": "2026-04-05T14:00:00Z",
  "item_enclosures": [
    {
      "url": "https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/podcast/512/episode.mp3",
      "length": "48291840",
      "type": "audio/mpeg"
    }
  ],
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-07T09:00:00Z"
}

Feed summary (one per feed)

{
  "type": "feed_summary",
  "feed_url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "feed_title": "Hacker News: Front Page",
  "feed_type": "rss",
  "items_count": 30,
  "latest_item_date": "2026-04-07T08:55:00Z",
  "oldest_item_date": "2026-04-07T01:10:00Z",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-07T09:00:00Z"
}

How to use

Paste feed URLs into the feedUrls input (one per line), set maxItemsPerFeed if you only need the latest, and run. Schedule the actor to run every hour for continuous monitoring, or trigger it via API from your own pipelines.

Input

Parameter	Description	Default
feedUrls	RSS, Atom or JSON feed URLs	(required)
maxItemsPerFeed	Cap items per feed	100
includeContent	Include full HTML content body	true
filterByDate	ISO date — only items newer than this	—
fetchTimeoutSeconds	HTTP timeout per feed	30
proxyConfiguration	Optional proxy config	disabled

Use cases

• Content marketing — monitor competitor blogs and spot new posts within minutes
• News aggregation — build custom news pipelines from hundreds of sources
• Podcast tracking — monitor new episodes across shows with enclosure URLs ready for download
• Release monitoring — watch GitHub release feeds, product changelogs and CVE feeds
• Academic research — track new papers from journal and preprint RSS feeds
• SEO competitive intel — measure publishing frequency and topic coverage of any site
• Newsletter curation — pull content from dozens of feeds into a single weekly digest
• Alerting — trigger Slack or email alerts when specific keywords appear in watched feeds

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.001
Per feed parsed	$0.002

Example: Monitor 1,000 feeds = ~$2.00 (1,000 × $0.002 + $0.001 start)

Feeds	Cost
100	$0.20
1,000	$2.00
10,000	$20.00

No per-item charges. No proxy markups. No external API fees.

Related Actors

• Website Content Crawler — full site scraping when a feed isn't enough
• Sitemap URL Discovery — discover all URLs on a site via sitemap.xml
• HTML to Markdown — convert feed HTML content into clean Markdown
• Website Tech Stack Detector — identify the CMS behind any feed

Issues & Feedback

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Issues tab — we respond within 24 hours.