RSS & Atom Feed Health Checker

Checks RSS and Atom feeds for validity, staleness, and broken item links -- no browser needed. Point it at one or more feed URLs and get back the feed format, item count, freshness, and a list of anything that looks broken -- plus a letter grade, a 0-100 health score, a severity tag, and a plain-English summary.

What you get, per feed

• A letter grade (A+ to F) and 0-100 health score at a glance
• A one-line executive summary ("Newest item is 45 day(s) old -- past the 30-day stale threshold.")
• A severity tag -- critical (feed unreachable/invalid, empty, stale, or every sampled link is broken), warning (other issues), or ok -- for instant triage
• Format detection: RSS 2.0 or Atom, or a clear flag if the response isn't a valid feed at all
• Freshness: date of the newest item and days since it was published, with a configurable staleness threshold
• Structural checks: missing titles, missing publish dates, duplicate item IDs/GUIDs, missing channel-level link
• Broken link sampling: a configurable number of item links (and podcast enclosure URLs, if present) are checked live, concurrently, for a working response
• Feeds are checked in parallel (configurable), so a batch of 30 feeds finishes in a fraction of the time a one-by-one check would take

Why this instead of checking manually

	Manual spot-checks	RSS & Atom Feed Health Checker
Coverage	Whatever feed you remember to open	Every feed you list, automatically
Speed	Open each feed, scan dates and links	Seconds, via parallel checks and sampling
Triage	You read the raw XML yourself	Pre-classified severity + letter grade
Repeatability	Forgotten until a subscriber complains	One click, or schedule it
Output	Notes in a doc	Structured dataset, exportable to CSV/JSON/BI tools

Who this is for

• Publishers and bloggers verifying their feed still works after a CMS migration
• Podcasters checking that enclosure URLs in their RSS feed are still live
• Anyone building a feed reader or aggregator who wants to pre-filter broken or stale sources
• Agencies monitoring a client's content feed for freshness

How to use it

1. Add one or more feed URLs (RSS or Atom).
2. Optionally adjust the stale threshold (days since last item), how many item/enclosure links to spot-check, and concurrency.
3. Run it once, or schedule it to catch a feed going stale or breaking after a deploy.

Example output (one item)

{
  "feedUrl": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "score": 100,
  "grade": "A+",
  "severity": "ok",
  "summary": "No issues found -- feed is healthy and up to date.",
  "found": true,
  "format": "RSS",
  "title": "Hacker News: Front Page",
  "itemCount": 30,
  "latestItemDate": "2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z",
  "daysSinceLastUpdate": 0,
  "isStale": false,
  "linksSampled": 10,
  "brokenSampledLinks": [],
  "issueCount": 0,
  "issues": [],
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing:

• Feed checked -- charged once per feed URL processed.

Parallel checking doesn't cost more -- it just finishes faster.

FAQ

Does this work for podcast feeds? Yes. Podcast RSS feeds are standard RSS 2.0 with <enclosure> tags for the audio file -- those enclosure URLs are included in the link-sampling check.

What counts as "stale"? A feed is flagged stale if the newest item's publish/updated date is older than your configured threshold (30 days by default). This is just a signal -- some feeds are legitimately low-frequency, so treat it as a prompt to double-check rather than a hard failure.

What makes something "critical" vs. a "warning"? critical covers the failures that mean the feed isn't doing its job right now: unreachable or invalid, empty, past the stale threshold, or every sampled link broken. warning covers everything else that lowers the score -- worth fixing, but not breaking the feed.

Does it crawl the whole site linked from the feed? No. It only fetches the feed XML itself and, optionally, does a lightweight live check (HEAD/GET) on a sample of the item and enclosure URLs listed inside it.

Will higher concurrency get me rate-limited? It can, on servers with aggressive rate limiting, though each feed is often a different host so cross-feed concurrency is usually gentle. Start at the default (5) and lower it if you see timeouts spike.