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RSS setup guide

How to Find an RSS Feed URL on Almost Any Website

Find the real RSS or Atom feed behind a blog, newsletter, or publication, verify that the URL is a feed, and know what to do when a site does not publish one.

6 minute read
Short answer: Start with the website itself: look for an RSS link, inspect the page source for a rel="alternate" feed link, or try the platform's documented feed pattern. A valid feed URL usually opens as XML and contains recent item titles and links.

The URL you need is not always the homepage

A website URL shows a page for people. An RSS or Atom URL returns a structured list of recent entries for software. The two may look similar, but a podcast or feed tool needs the structured feed URL.

Do not worry if opening the feed shows raw XML. That is normal. What matters is that the document contains the publication name and recent entries, not that it looks like a designed webpage.

Find the feed in four steps

  1. 1Check the header, footer, About page, or subscription page for an RSS link or orange feed icon.
  2. 2Open the page source and search for application/rss+xml, application/atom+xml, or rel="alternate". The href on that link is the feed URL.
  3. 3Try the platform's documented pattern. WordPress commonly uses /feed/ after the site address; Substack publications use /feed after their publication address.
  4. 4Open the candidate URL. Confirm that it contains recent titles and links, then paste that exact URL into your feed tool.

Common feed patterns

  • WordPress.com: https://example.com/feed/ for the main publication. Category, tag, and author feeds can be narrower and are often better inputs.
  • Substack: https://publication.substack.com/feed.
  • Sites with feed discovery: look for a link element whose type is application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml.
  • Custom publications: use the feed URL the publisher documents. Guessing /rss or /feed.xml can work, but it is not a standard guarantee.

Choose a feed that produces a useful briefing

The broadest feed is not automatically the best one. A busy homepage feed may mix announcements, jobs, product updates, and unrelated categories. Prefer a topic or author feed when it matches what you actually want to hear.

Before adding several feeds, scan their latest entries. Remove duplicates, avoid feeds that only contain one-line teasers, and favor sources with stable titles, publication dates, and enough text to understand the update.

When the website has no feed

A page without a published RSS or Atom endpoint cannot be made into a reliable feed just by changing its URL. You can add a public article URL to PPPodcasts as a one-off source, but a recurring briefing needs a source that keeps publishing discoverable updates.

Avoid third-party feed generators for private pages, paywalled material, or sites whose terms prohibit automated retrieval. They add another failure point and may copy content somewhere you did not intend.