How to create an RSS feed
from any website

To create an RSS feed from a website, first look for the feed the site already publishes — many hide it at /feed or /rss.xml. If there is none, a generator can build one from a list of links on the page. If the page changes in place instead of adding posts, use a change monitor that adds a feed item every time the page changes.

The three approaches solve different problems. A site's own feed and an HTML generator both answer "what is new on this list?". A change feed answers "what changed on this page?" — which is the question you have for pricing pages, terms of service, documentation, job boards and product pages.

By the PageRadar team · We make PageRadar, which offers the change feed described in step 4.

Blogs, news sites, podcasts, forums and most content-management systems publish a feed by default, even when no RSS icon is visible. Before you build anything, spend two minutes looking for it:

• Try the usual addresses. Add /feed, /rss, /rss.xml, /atom.xml or /feed.xml to the site or section URL. WordPress sites answer on /feed, and many category or tag pages have their own feed at /category/name/feed.
• Search the page source. Open the page, choose View Page Source, and search for application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml. A feed is usually declared as <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="…">; the href is the feed URL.
• Paste the site URL into your reader. Feedly, Inoreader and NetNewsWire all look for the declared feed when you paste an ordinary page address, so this often finds it for you.
• Look for platform feeds. YouTube channels, subreddits, GitHub releases and many podcast hosts expose feeds at predictable URLs even though they do not advertise them.

If you find a feed, you are done: subscribe in your reader. The rest of this guide is for sites that do not publish one, or for pages a normal feed would never cover.

RSS generators — some hosted, some open source you can run yourself — fetch a page, find a repeating block such as a list of article titles and links, and turn each block into a feed item. You usually point them at the list page and sometimes pick the item, title and link with CSS selectors.

This works well when the page is a plain list that grows over time: a company blog without a feed, a "press releases" index, a list of grant calls, a changelog that adds entries at the top. The generator re-fetches the page periodically and new list entries become new feed items.

Generators are built around one assumption — new content appears as new entries in a list. Three common cases break it:

• Pages built with JavaScript. Many shops, job boards and modern sites send almost empty HTML and fill in the content in the browser. A generator that reads the raw HTML sees nothing to extract.
• Pages with no list. A pricing page, a policy, a product page or a government notice has no repeating items to turn into a feed.
• Edits to existing content. When a price goes from $29 to $49, a rule is reworded or a "Sold out" label disappears, nothing new is added — the page changes in place. A feed built from list entries never notices.

For all three, what you actually want is not a feed of new posts but a feed of changes. That is the job of a website change monitor, and it is the approach in step 4.

Each monitor has a standard RSS 2.0 feed of its most recent 50 detected changes. Every item is titled with the size of the change — for example "Change detected — 3 added, 1 removed" — and its description is the one-line AI summary of what changed when one is available, such as "Pro plan price raised from $29 to $49". The item links to the monitor in your PageRadar dashboard, where the highlighted diff shows exactly which lines changed.

Items only appear when a real change is detected, so a quiet page stays quiet in your reader. Because the feed follows the monitor, everything you set on the monitor — the watched element, the noise-filter prompt, the check frequency — shapes what reaches the feed.

Good candidates for a change feed: competitor pricing pages, terms of service and privacy policies, API documentation, careers pages, regulatory notices, and product pages you are waiting on. Want alerts the moment something changes rather than when you next open your reader? The same monitor can also notify you by email, Telegram, Slack or webhook — see how to track changes on a website.

Google Alerts can also deliver results as RSS, but it reports new search results for a keyword, not changes to a page you pick — see Google Alerts alternatives for the difference. If the change you care about is a word or phrase appearing on a page, see content monitoring.

• Your feed URL is a credential. It contains your API key. Keep it in a private reader; if it leaks, revoke the key in your settings and create a new one.
• One feed per monitor. Watching ten pages means ten feeds — most readers let you group them in one folder.
• Some sites block automated checks. Sites with enterprise bot protection can refuse the check; the monitor then shows as Blocked on your dashboard instead of failing silently. Try the page on the free plan first.
• The feed is as fresh as the check. Hourly on Basic, every 15 minutes on Pro, every 5 minutes on Business.