How to Find RSS and Atom Feeds for any website

RSS and Atom are formats that are “hiding in plain sight”. Lots of websites have them, but it might not be obvious how to get them.

Feed Discovery Was Designed For Machines, Not Humans 🙁 ¶

Partly, this is due to the way the RSS specification suggests advertising feeds through an autodiscovery mechanism (see here for the technical details). This process is less for humans and more for automation, like your browser, or your feed reader. That was a novel and useful approach back when browsers had integrated feed readers and RSS/Atom were more popular. Nowadays, it makes these formats harder to find and discover.

The good news however is that there are lots of other ways to find good feed sources. A few techniques are listed in this article.

Technique 1: Use Your Feed Reader ¶

Modern feed readers, like Foragd, will auto-detect the feed given a website URL. They utilize the autodiscovery process, along with other sleuthing techniques to find feeds for your favorite sites. So in a lot of cases, it may be as simple as just providing the URL of the site to the feed reader and let it do its magic. No need to parse the site’s HTML or scan the content or find a site directory; just enter the URL, and in most cases, 💥 you have your favorite site’s content streaming to your feed reader.

ℹ️ You can use Foragd’s Feed Viewer to find and parse the feed content of any website.

Technique 2: Where’s Waldo ¶

Many websites display their RSS feed link in the footer as text or an RSS icon — look for the words ‘Feed’, ‘RSS’, or ‘Atom’, or the orange RSS icon. For example one of the following:

Such links usually return the raw feed content, so they can be copied and pasted into your feed reader to add them.

Technique 3: The Old Appender ¶

Despite the web being wonderfully diverse, the majority of websites use a handful of frameworks behind the scenes, and these have predictable URLs where their feeds are located. What does this mean? It means most websites have an RSS feed at a canonical URL or address. You can then utilise this to find the feed for any site. In most cases add one of the following onto the end of the site URL:

• /rss
• /feed
• /feeds/posts/default

Foragd uses this technique when it can’t find a feed natively, but you can also check yourself. If the new URL returns feed content, you’ve found yourself the site’s feed!

Technique 4: Feed Search Engines/Lists ¶

There are a few dedicated search engines for feeds and sites with quality feed links out there you can peruse:

• feedle.world: A feed search engine and discovery site. Contains a lot of independent bloggers and sources. Try the random search feature 🎲.
• feedsearch.dev: While targeted for API usage (i.e., built into another app), the site itself will return a human-readable list of feeds for a given site.
• Feedspot: A large database of RSS feeds. The categories are a bit dubious and IMO SEO-clickbaity but its possible to find some useful feed links among the lists.
• RSSHub: Is both a search engine and tool you can self-host to provide feed links for sites, including generating feed links for sites that don’t publish their own. There are public instances you use to browse all available feed links for different sites. Quality can be hit-and-miss, so YMMV.
• Kagi Small Web: is an old-school webring of independent sites. You can search or navigate by site and topics to find independent blogs and sources.

A little bit of search-fu might work if all else fails. In your favorite search engine, try a search like site:my-favorite.site file:rss. If you are lucky, the results may include the RSS link for the site.

Conclusion ¶

To find RSS and Atom feeds for any website, try these approaches in order: paste the site URL directly into your feed reader and let it auto-discover the feed; look for RSS or feed links in the site’s footer; try appending /feed, /rss, or /feeds/posts/default to the site URL; or use a dedicated feed search engine like feedle.world, feedsearch.dev, or RSSHub. In most cases, a good feed reader like Foragd will handle discovery automatically.

If you want to try out using RSS and Atom feeds, you can start a free trial of Foragd and start gathering your own collection of topics, news, and opinions!

License: CC BY-SA 4.0.