RSS Feed Scraper — Atom, Podcast & Multi-Feed Aggregator

What this Actor scrapes

RSS and Atom are still the most reliable way to subscribe to a publication. This Actor parses any feed URL — news site, blog, podcast, GitHub release feed, Reddit, Substack, Medium per-user — and writes one row per item. Output is normalised across RSS and Atom dialects so downstream code never needs to care which format it received.

Feed sources that work out of the box:

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or 429 response.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per feed, Retry-After header honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when a feed host pushes back, we slow down and surface exactly what was collected before the limit hit.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, exportable as JSON / CSV / Excel straight from Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for results that land in your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small actor-start fee).
• 📡 Multi-feed batching — pass a list of URLs; the Actor fetches and normalises them all in one run, deduplicating by GUID.
• 📝 Full HTML content — when a feed publishes content:encoded or Atom content, we capture the full body alongside the summary, not just a truncated snippet.

Use cases

• News aggregation dashboard — pull 20 publications into one stream and pipe to Slack, Discord, or a webhook.
• Brand monitoring — track every Google Alerts RSS feed for your company name, product, or competitors.
• Content automation — feed company-blog RSS into a translation pipeline, summary LLM, or newsletter tool.
• Podcast RSS parser — podcast RSS is standard RSS with <enclosure> tags; this Actor surfaces the episode link, title, author, and published date for every episode in the feed.
• LLM-ready news digest — pass structured rows straight to an LLM pipeline; ISO-8601 timestamps and clean HTML make chunking predictable.
• RSS-to-Google-Sheets / Notion / Airtable — export via Apify's native integration or the API; no glue code required.
• Feed archival — schedule the Actor daily to build a rolling archive of feeds that don't publish full history.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
    "https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 25,
  "includeContent": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

feed_urlfeed_titlefeed_formatitem_idtitlelinkauthorsummarycontent_htmlcategoriespublishedupdatedscraped_at

{
  "feed_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
  "feed_title": "Hacker News",
  "feed_format": "rss",
  "item_id": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000000",
  "title": "Show HN: Building a hosted RSS parser for the post-LLM web",
  "link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000000",
  "author": null,
  "summary": "A discussion about ...",
  "content_html": null,
  "categories": [],
  "published": "2026-05-15T20:00:00+00:00",
  "updated": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-01T09:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Paginated feeds — we don't follow <link rel="next"> paged feeds automatically. Pass each page URL explicitly if you need full history.
• JavaScript-rendered feeds — feeds that require JavaScript to load are not supported. You would need a browser-based Actor for those.
• Malformed XML — feedparser is lenient and handles most broken XML, but severely corrupted feeds may yield partial or empty results. The run surfaces a warning, not a silent empty dataset.
• Rate-limiting by feed hosts — heavily scraped feeds (e.g. Reddit) may enforce per-IP rate limits. Enable Apify Proxy in proxyConfiguration to rotate IPs.