RSS Feed Reader & Monitor: New Items, Atom, Feed Finder

Use when…

• You need to read or monitor one or more RSS/Atom feeds for new items.
• An agent should find a site’s feed URL and return only new posts since last check.
• You want structured feed items (title, link, date) without a full page scrape.

Try this input

Copy-paste this JSON as the Actor input (it matches a successful run / the default schema):

{
  "requests": [
    {
      "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
      "max_items": 5
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.theverge.com",
      "max_items": 3
    }
  ]
}

Sample output (real run 2026-10-25)

One dataset item, shortened:

{
  "url": "https://www.theverge.com",
  "feed_url": "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
  "feed_title": "The Verge",
  "feed_link": "https://www.theverge.com",
  "discovered_feeds": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
      "title": "The Verge"
    }
  ],
  "item_count": 3,
  "new_count": null,
  "result": "ok",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://www.theverge.com/?p=1017983",
      "title": "Google’s AI search changes upended online publishing",
      "link": "https://www.theverge.com/column/1017983/google-ai-search-online-publishing",
      "published": "2026-10-25T12:00:00Z",
      "author": "Emma Roth",
      "summary": "This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in ou…",
      "categories": [
        "AI",
        "Column",
        "… +1 more"
      ],
      "enclosure": null
    },
    {
      "id": "https://www.theverge.com/?p=1018205",
      "title": "Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI",
      "link": "https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1018205/blue-planet-iii-authentic-organic-ai",
      "published": "2026-10-24T21:29:12Z",
      "author": "Terrence O’Brien",
      "summary": "BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, cry…",
      "categories": [
        "AI",
        "Entertainment",
        "… +3 more"
      ],
      "enclosure": null
    },
    "… +1 more"
  ],
  "error": null
}

One cheap call turns any blog, news site or podcast feed into clean JSON. Schedule it with monitor: true and you only get what's new.

• RSS 0.9x/1.0/2.0, Atom and JSON-ish feeds via feedparser; title, link, published (UTC ISO), author, summary, categories, enclosure
• Give a normal website URL and it finds the feed (link tags, then /feed, /rss, /atom.xml...)
• discover_only: true just lists the feeds a site offers
• keywords filter on title + summary
• Monitor mode: first run saves a baseline, later runs return only new items (state kept in your account's key-value store rss-feed-watch-state; use watch_id to keep separate watches)
• Pair with an Apify schedule + webhook / email integration for alerts

Input

{"requests": [{"url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "max_items": 10}, {"url": "https://www.theverge.com", "monitor": true, "keywords": ["AI"]}]}

Send many items in requests per run (cheaper and faster than one run each). Settings outside requests apply to every item.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0005 per feed read (one feed read (any number of items)). Rows with errors are not charged. No subscription.

Output

One dataset row per request. Errors come back as a row with error set, so a batch never fails because of one bad item.

Use from AI agents (MCP)

Add it to any MCP client via https://mcp.apify.com?actors=tudorlane/rss-feed-watch, or call the Apify API / run-sync endpoint.

Sources and licences

Only the feeds you supply. Feed content belongs to its publishers; respect their terms when republishing.

Sample output (real run with the default input, 25 Oct 2026)

Input	Feed found	Items	Latest item
https://www.theverge.com	The Verge (theverge.com/rss/index.xml)	3	Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI
https://hnrss.org/frontpage	Hacker News: Front Page	5	Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to ...

Use cases

1. Monitor blogs and news for new posts
2. Find a site's RSS feed
3. Feed new items to Slack/email via Zapier, Make or n8n
4. AI agents: what's new on a site

Limits & failure modes

• Only sites that publish RSS/Atom feeds
• First run is a baseline; later runs show new items
• Feed discovery can fail on sites without standard RSS/Atom links.
• Broken or non-XML feeds return an error for that URL.
• “New items” require the same watch identity across runs; first run may return the current window only.