Sitemap News Article Extractor – article text and metadata from any XML sitemap

Give it one or more public XML sitemap links and it reads the article pages listed in them. You get back one row per article, with the title, clean plain text, word count, language, description and the sitemap it came from. Author, publish date and last-modified date are included when the page or sitemap provides them.

It follows nested sitemap indexes to a bounded depth, so you can start from a site's main sitemap.xml. You can narrow the pages with a URL filter such as /blog/. Schedule it from the Apify Console to re-check a site on a regular basis.

Why this one

• No browser, no login. It makes plain HTTP requests to public pages, so runs are quick and predictable.
• Clean text, not raw HTML. It pulls out the readable article body using a Readability-style approach.
• Stable IDs. Each row has an id (a hash of the URL), so you can join and deduplicate across runs.
• Filters that save money. Use URL substring filter and Minimum text length to skip pages you don't want.
• Sitemap indexes handled. Nested sitemaps are followed for you.
• Pay per result. $2.10 per 1,000 results, with no start fee, and runs with no results cost nothing.

Quick start

{
  "sitemapUrls": ["https://www.apify.com/sitemap.xml"],
  "maxArticles": 5,
  "minTextLength": 200
}

In a test run on 27 Oct 2026 this returned 5 pages, each with title, text, word count and language.

What you can use it for

Who	What for
AI and data engineers	Feed clean article text into RAG pipelines and vector databases
Marketing and PR teams	Monitor what publishers and competitors put out
SEO specialists	Audit titles, descriptions and word counts across a site
Researchers	Build text datasets from public articles in one section of a site
Content teams	Make an inventory of your own or a partner's content

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Add one or more links under Sitemap URLs, for example https://www.apify.com/sitemap.xml. Use public https sitemaps (urlset or sitemapindex).
3. Set Maximum articles (1 to 500, default 20), for example 50.
4. Optionally set URL substring filter to keep only matching URLs, for example /blog/.
5. Optionally set Minimum text length to skip thin pages (default 200 characters).
6. Click Start.

To keep a content feed fresh, set the run on a schedule and export the dataset each time.

What data you get

Each row is one article page.

Field	What it is	Example
id	Stable hash of the URL	f56239f8394443ac49195075d5fa66a7bd7218c6
url	Article page address	https://apify.com/actors
title	Page title	Automate anything with Apify Actors · Apify
author	Author, when the page provides one	null
publishedAt	Publish date, when found	null
lastModified	Last-modified date from the sitemap, when given	null
description	Page description	Actors are web data automations that power your AI and operations.
language	Page language	en
text	Clean plain text of the article	Actors are web data automations...
wordCount	Words in the extracted text	383
sitemapUrl	Sitemap the link was found in	https://apify.com/sitemap/pages.xml
scrapedAt	When the page was fetched	2026-10-27T09:20:08.866Z

Pricing

Event	Price
Result (each row written to the dataset)	$0.0021

Run	Cost
100 results	$0.21
1,000 results	$2.10
10,000 results	$21.00

There is no start fee. Runs with no results cost nothing.

Good to know

• Limits. Up to 500 articles per run, 2 levels of sitemap nesting, 50 sitemap files and a 20-second timeout per request.
• Data source. Public sitemaps and public article pages fetched over HTTPS at run time.
• No JavaScript rendering. Content loaded only in the browser may be missing.
• Heuristic extraction. Author and date depend on common meta tags and JSON-LD, so they are often empty.
• No access tricks. It never logs in and does not bypass paywalls, CAPTCHAs or access controls.
• Your use of the text. Respect each publisher's terms and copyright when reusing content.
• Not affiliated. This tool isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the sites you extract from.

FAQ

Can I start from a sitemap index? Yes. Nested sitemaps are followed to a bounded depth.

How do I get only blog posts? Set URL substring filter to /blog/.

Why are some pages missing? Pages with less text than Minimum text length are skipped. Lower it, or set it to 0, to keep them.

Getting the data out

Download results as Excel, CSV or JSON from the Output tab. Send them to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or webhooks from the Integrations tab. Every run is also available through the Apify API, and you can schedule runs from Schedules.

Questions or problems

Open an issue on the Issues tab and include the run link. I reply within one business day.

Related tools

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• Hacker News Search and Who-is-Hiring Extractor: search Hacker News and pull who-is-hiring posts
• Google News RSS Topic Scraper: get Google News results for a topic