RSS & Atom Feed Reader + New Items Monitor

Turn any RSS, Atom or JSON Feed into clean, flat JSON — title, link, publication date, author, categories, summary, full content and podcast enclosures. Paste a feed URL or just a homepage: the Actor auto-discovers the feed from <link rel="alternate"> and common paths like /feed, /rss and /atom.xml.

Enable monitor mode and schedule it to get only the new posts since the last run — competitor blogs, product changelogs, podcasts, Substack newsletters, GitHub releases and news wires.

No browser, no proxies, no login: it only reads the public feed files publishers already expose to readers and aggregators, so runs stay fast and cheap.

What does this Actor do?

• 📡 Reads RSS 2.0, Atom and JSON Feed into one unified schema
• 🔎 Auto-discovers feeds from a blog or company homepage
• 🧾 Rich fields: title, link, guid, published/updated dates, author, categories/tags, plain-text summary, HTML/text content, enclosure (podcast/media) URL + type + size, image
• 🎯 Keyword and regex filters — keep only the posts that match your topics
• 📅 Date filter — only items from the last N days or after a date
• 🆕 Monitor mode — remembers items between runs and outputs only new ones (perfect with Apify Schedules + email/Slack/webhook)
• 🛡️ Robust: retries with backoff, honors Retry-After, per-feed error report, one broken feed never fails the whole run
• 🤖 AI-agent friendly: simple input, flat JSON, usable via the Apify API and MCP

Why use an RSS / Atom feed API?

Feeds are the cleanest public API most blogs, newsrooms, podcasts and SaaS changelogs still publish. Compared to scraping HTML articles, a feed gives you structured titles, dates and permalinks in one request — ideal for monitoring, alerting, RAG ingestion and content aggregation.

What data can it extract?

Field	Description
title, link, guid	Item title, permalink and stable id
publishedAt, updatedAt	Normalized UTC timestamps when the feed provides dates
author, categories	Author name(s) and tags
summary, contentText, contentHtml	Excerpt and full body (optional)
enclosureUrl, enclosureType, enclosureLength	Podcast / media attachments
feedTitle, feedUrl, feedFormat	Source feed metadata (rss / atom / json)
isNew	Set in monitor mode when the item was not seen before

How to read or monitor RSS feeds

1. Open the Input tab and paste one or more feed URLs (or homepage URLs).
2. Optionally set keyword filters, a date window, or enable Monitor mode.
3. Click Start. Results appear in the Dataset tab within seconds.
4. For monitoring: run once to save the baseline, then create an Apify Schedule (hourly/daily) and add an email, Slack or webhook integration.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event: you are charged for each feed item written to the dataset. Feed discovery, filtered-out items and the monitor-mode baseline run are not charged per item. Platform usage is covered by the Actor (you do not pay compute on top). Set a maximum cost per run in the run options — the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Typical runs of a few feeds with tens of items finish in well under a minute on 256 MB.

Input

Only feedUrls is required. Example:

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://www.nasa.gov/feed/",
    "https://github.com/apify/apify-sdk-python/releases.atom"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 20,
  "includeKeywords": [],
  "onlyNewItems": false,
  "includeContent": true
}

Field	Description
feedUrls	Feed URLs or website URLs (auto-discovery on).
maxItemsPerFeed	Cap on items written per feed (default 50).
includeKeywords / excludeKeywords	Case-insensitive keyword filters on title/summary/content/tags/author.
includeUrlPatterns / excludeUrlPatterns	Regex filters on the item link.
publishedWithinDays / publishedAfter	Date window.
onlyNewItems	Monitor mode: output only items not seen before.
emitAllOnFirstRun	Also emit items on the first monitor run.
discoverFromPage	Auto-find feeds from homepages (default on).
includeContent	Include contentText / contentHtml.
Advanced	maxConcurrency, requestTimeoutSecs, maxRetries, proxyConfiguration.

See the Input tab for the full form.

Output

One dataset item per feed entry. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or via API. Example:

{
  "feedUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/feed/",
  "feedTitle": "Hacker News",
  "feedFormat": "rss",
  "title": "Example story title",
  "link": "https://example.com/story",
  "guid": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123",
  "publishedAt": "2026-11-05T12:34:56Z",
  "author": null,
  "summary": "Example story title",
  "categories": [],
  "extractedAt": "2026-11-05T18:00:00Z"
}

A per-feed report (format, items found/filtered/output, new items, errors) is saved to the key-value store record SUMMARY.

How to monitor a feed for new posts

1. Add the feeds to feedUrls and enable Monitor mode.
2. Run once — this saves the baseline (no results, no per-item charge).
3. Create a Schedule (e.g. every hour or daily) in Apify Console.
4. Add an integration (email, Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, webhook) to receive the new items.

Seen item ids are stored in a private named key-value store rss-feed-monitor-state in your own Apify account. Delete a record there to reset the baseline for a feed.

FAQ

What feed formats are supported? RSS 2.0 (including RDF/RSS 1.0 channel), Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed 1.1. Most blogs (WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Medium), podcasts, GitHub release Atom feeds and news sites work out of the box.

Can I paste a homepage instead of a feed URL? Yes. With discovery on, the Actor looks for <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> (and Atom/JSON equivalents) plus common paths like /feed, /rss, /atom.xml, /feed.xml, /feed.json.

Does monitor mode re-emit edited posts? Items are keyed by GUID / link (or title+date fallback). If the publisher keeps the same GUID and only edits the body, the item stays "seen". A brand-new GUID/link is treated as new.

Is it legal? Feeds are public files that publishers expose specifically for syndication. The Actor collects only what the feed already publishes. You are responsible for how you use the output and for respecting each publisher's terms and copyright (especially full content fields).

The feed is empty or blocked — what happens? The feed is reported in SUMMARY with a status such as http-error, no-feed-found or empty; other feeds in the same run continue. Some sites (e.g. Hacker News) return HTTP 419 to datacenter IPs — enable Apify Proxy for those hosts, or use a different feed.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store. For programmatic access, see the API tab.