How to get an RSS feed from a website that doesn't have one

Check for a hidden RSS feed first

Plenty of sites have a feed and simply do not show a button for it. In HTTP Archive's 2023 crawl of 16.5 million mobile home pages, 37.79% carried an RSS link in their code. That makes the page source the first place to look.

Open the page, view its source (Ctrl+U on Windows, Option+Cmd+U on a Mac), and search for rss+xml or atom+xml. A feed announces itself with a link tag in the page's head, and the href in that tag is the feed's address. Paste it into any feed reader.

Common RSS feed addresses by platform

If the source has no link, the platform behind the site often has a feed at a predictable address anyway. Add these to the site's address:

Create an RSS feed from a website with a generator

When there is no feed at all, a generator builds one. You give it the page, point at the repeating items (usually the headlines in a list), and it fetches the page on a schedule and publishes each new item as a feed entry. Because it reads the page's layout, a redesign can break it until you point it at the items again.

• FetchRSS creates a feed from almost any web page. Its free plan covers 5 feeds updated every 24 hours, and free feeds left unused for 7 days are deleted.
• PolitePaul, which was called PolitePol until March 2026, has a free plan with 3 feeds updated every 1.5 hours.
• RSS.app's free plan only follows sites that already publish a native feed; building feeds for pages without one is on its paid plans.
• Feed readers have built this in on paid plans: Inoreader calls it Web feeds & Track changes, and Feedly's RSS Builder is on its Pro+ and Enterprise plans.

Open-source options: RSS-Bridge and RSSHub

If you would rather run it yourself, two open-source projects cover most of what the hosted generators do.

• RSS-Bridge describes itself as generating web feeds for websites that do not have one. You can host it yourself or try the public instance at rss-bridge.org.
• RSSHub works from ready-made routes, each written for a specific site, so it is strongest on popular sites someone has already written a route for. It is AGPL-licensed, with self-hosting and public instances.

Or skip RSS: get an alert when the page changes

A feed answers one question: what is new. It cannot tell you that something already published was edited. An RSS 2.0 item only carries the date it was published, and Atom's updated date is left to the publisher, who may not change it for every edit. Neither format says what changed.

A page monitor works the other way round. It compares the page between checks and alerts you to any difference, new item or edit, with the removed and added lines in the alert. Add a plain-English rule and it alerts only on what you describe. The guide to getting notified when a website posts something new shows that setup on a real page.

RSS feed or page monitor: which to use

Most people end up using both, for different pages.

The general setup for a page monitor is in how to monitor a website for changes.