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Apps & Feeds

How to Find the RSS Feed of Any News Site

Many news sites use RSS feeds to syndicate their articles for readers to follow, but these feeds are not always easy to find.

Best News Links desk4 min read

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Photo: Kwameghana(Bright Kwame Ayisi) via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
In this guide
  1. How RSS Feeds Advertise Themselves
  2. The Quickest Manual Checks
  3. Try the Platform Defaults
  4. Use a Reader or Finder to Auto-Discover
  5. When the Site Does Not Publish a Feed
  6. Confirm the Feed is Usable

Many news sites use RSS feeds to syndicate their articles for readers to follow, but these feeds are not always easy to find. This guide goes through three key approaches to locate a site's feed, from manual browsing to automatic discovery tools, so you can set up that feed in your reader.

How RSS Feeds Advertise Themselves

The simplest way to understand how to find a feed is to understand what an RSS feed is to begin with. An RSS feed is a document that describes a site's articles in a standardized way, so readers can automatically fetch the latest posts.

When a site offers a feed, it often advertises the feed's URL in the HTML of each page. This allows browsers and readers to autodiscover the feed when a user opens the site.

<head> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss.xml" /> .. </head>

Here, the link element's rel attribute adapts the alternate relationship, which signals this URL as an alternate form of the page.

Historically, some pages used the feed relationship instead of alternate. Today, the spec encourages alternate as the primary relationship for syndication feeds.

The Quickest Manual Checks

If a site offers an RSS feed, you'll often see an RSS icon in the page header, footer, or sidebar.

Autodiscoverable feeds are easy to browse in most modern readers: just enter the homepage URL, and the app will extract the feed URL.

You can also check for the feed manually, no tools needed. Open the page source by right-clicking and choosing "View Page Source", then search for the link element seen above. Its href attribute points to the feed URL.

This is the quickest check to run, so always try it first. But what if the source code doesn't list a feed?

Try the Platform Defaults

If a site's page source doesn't declare a feed URL, you can still look for a feed at common paths the platform might use.

You'd think a site's RSS feed is at its homepage URL, but most sites expose it in a folder of its own. So don't just append /rss onto the front page — check all of these paths:

https://example.com/feed https://example.com/rss https://example.com/rss.xml

Drupal makes /rss.xml its default.

WordPress also exposes category feeds at /category//feed/ and tag feeds at /tag//feed/, where is the category or tag's unique identifier.

Ghost and some other platforms use /feed.rdf or /rss.xml as paths. Always look for the real path on the site's front page.

Use a Reader or Finder to Auto-Discover

The manual checks are usually enough, but some sites don't use autodiscovery or follow standards, so you might need a more automated approach.

Some small tools can extract autodiscovery links — like Fetch RSS, which lets you paste a site URL and returns any feed URLs embedded in its HTML.

You can also use open-source tools packaged as browser extensions, like IntelCue's browser add-on RSS Finder, which tests common paths and shows a prompt.

You can also use a paste-anything approach with an app like Feedbin or Inoreader, both of which process an open page URL and suggest feeds.

When the Site Does Not Publish a Feed

Some sites just don't expose a feed at all, in which case it might be worth asking a site contact about the availability of an RSS feed.

If there is really no feed, check the site's archive section for its archive page, categories, or author listings. Newsletters are another fallback — you can usually preview emails in your browser as plain text, then grab the full text through the RSS reader.

If the site lacks a feed, newsletters, and archives, it may not syndicate, in which case you'll have to flip what this article takes away: RSS feeds are highly common, but not universal. And when a feed is not there, going direct to a site is often the best practice.

Confirm the Feed is Usable

Once you locate a URL, you can plug it into your reader and subscribe to it. But double-check a few details to make sure the reader never breaks updates.

Most importantly, make sure the URL returns a recent list of headlines. One broken post or empty feed can cause a reader to fail to fetch all content.

Your feed client can usually run a quick test to check for errors. If a reader can't reach a page, check for an alternate URL and try again.

If this all fails, you may have to abandon the site, or more likely, go to your reader's support to query how to preempt its autodiscovery.

This guide describes general practice in the United States at the time of writing. Prices, library services and publisher policies change; check the current terms on the official page before you rely on them.

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