How to Find the RSS Feed of Any Website (Even When It's Hidden)

The orange RSS icon disappeared from the web around 2013. The feeds mostly didn't. WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Medium, most news sites, every podcast, and a surprising number of company blogs still publish one — they just stopped putting a link to it anywhere you'd notice.

So "this site doesn't have RSS" is usually wrong. Here's how to check properly, in the order that costs you the least time.

1. Guess the URL (10 seconds)

Six paths cover the large majority of publishing software. Take the site's root and try:

/feed
/rss
/feed.xml
/rss.xml
/atom.xml
/index.xml

WordPress answers on /feed. Ghost answers on /rss. Hugo and most static-site generators answer on /index.xml or /atom.xml. Jekyll usually does /feed.xml.

You'll know you've hit one when you get a wall of XML, or a plain browser-rendered list of article titles. If you get the site's 404 page, move on — don't spend more than a few seconds here.

One caveat: some sites answer on a subpath rather than the root. A publication at example.com/blog may well put its feed at example.com/blog/feed, so try the section root too.

2. Read one line of the page source (30 seconds, and it's authoritative)

Guessing is the shortcut. This is the actual mechanism.

The HTML standard has a way for a page to declare its own feed, and it's the thing every feed reader looks for first:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example Blog" href="/feed.xml">

To find it: open the page, view source (Ctrl+U / Cmd+Option+U), then search the source for alternate. If a feed exists and the publisher wired it up correctly, its address is sitting right there in the href. The type will be application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml — both are feeds, and any reader worth using consumes both.

If the href is relative (/feed.xml rather than the full address), stick it on the end of the site's origin.

This is worth knowing because it's the case that beats guessing: a site on a custom domain running software you can't identify, publishing at some path you'd never try, still has to declare itself here for browsers and readers to find it.

3. Platform rules that URL-guessing won't find

Some of the sources you most want are the ones where neither trick above works, because the feed lives at a URL derived from a handle or an ID.

Substack — https://<publication>.substack.com/feed. On a custom domain, the publication still declares the feed in its page source, so step 2 finds it.

Medium — https://medium.com/feed/@username. Note the ordering: it's /feed/@user, not /@user/feed, which is the mistake almost everyone makes first.

Reddit — append .rss to the listing you're looking at. https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/.rss for a subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/user/name/.rss for a user. No lookup required, which makes Reddit the easiest social source to pull into a reader.

Mastodon — https://<instance>/@<user>.rss. If you have the handle in @user@instance.tld form, the instance is the part after the second @.

Bluesky — https://bsky.app/profile/<handle>/rss, where the handle is what's in the profile URL (alice.bsky.social, or a custom domain handle).

YouTube — the feed is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>, and the channel ID is the awkward part. If the channel URL is /channel/UC..., you already have it. If it's a @handle or a /c/ vanity URL, the ID isn't in the URL at all — open the channel page, view source, and search for channelId or the canonical link. Both contain the UC… string you need.

Podcasts — every podcast is an RSS feed; that's what the medium is built on. If you have an Apple Podcasts link, the show's real feed URL can be looked up from the numeric id in that link. Most podcasts also link their feed from their own website.

GitHub — releases and commits are feeds: https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/releases.atom and .../commits/<branch>.atom. Underrated for tracking dependencies you care about.

The ones that publish nothing. Instagram, TikTok and Threads offer no feeds; X removed its own years ago. That is not an oversight you can work around with a cleverer URL — see the next section.

4. When there really is no feed

Sometimes the honest answer is that there isn't one. Two different situations, and it helps to know which you're in.

The site simply doesn't publish one. Plenty of sites are hand-built, or run on something that never emitted a feed, or had one and quietly dropped it. Nothing is hidden — steps 1 and 2 came up empty because there is nothing to find.

The platform refuses on purpose. Instagram, TikTok and Threads have never offered feeds. X removed its own. These are business decisions rather than oversights: a feed lets you read without visiting, and their revenue depends on the visit. No amount of URL guessing changes that.

What actually works, in the order worth trying:

Find where else they publish. Most people worth following are in more than one place — a newsletter, a personal blog, a YouTube channel, a Mastodon or Bluesky account that mirrors the same posts. The account you can't subscribe to is often not the only copy.

Use email as the fallback. Almost every site without RSS still has an email list, and email can be turned back into a feed. Feedpik issues you a private inbox address: subscribe with it, or forward what you already receive, and each sender arrives as its own source you can file, mute or unsubscribe from, rather than one undifferentiated pile in your actual inbox. Under Discover Sources → Newsletter.

Third-party bridges, with your eyes open. Projects like RSSHub and RSS-Bridge rebuild feeds by scraping. They work until the platform changes its markup or blocks them — which is often — and for the platforms above, using one is against their terms. Worth knowing they exist; not worth building a reading habit on.

Not the same problem: paid subscriptions. A paid Substack, Ghost or Patreon does give you a feed — a personal one, with your access carried in the URL. It behaves like any other feed, but treat it as a credential: never post it publicly, and use a reader that keeps private feeds out of anything it shares.

5. Or paste the address and let the reader do all of it

Everything above is what a feed reader does for you when it's built properly. In Feedpik, open Discover Sources, paste any site address, and it:

1. Fetches the page and reads its rel="alternate" declarations — step 2, automatically.
2. Falls back to probing the six common paths — step 1, automatically.
3. Recognises Substack, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, YouTube and Apple Podcasts URLs and builds the right feed URL directly — step 3, automatically, including the YouTube channel-ID lookup.

It also distinguishes between two answers that look the same but aren't: we couldn't reach that address (typo, dead site, or the server is down) and we reached it and there's no feed here (the publisher doesn't offer one). Telling you to check your URL when the URL was fine sends you off fixing the wrong thing.

One detail that matters more than it should: Feedpik identifies itself as a plain feed fetcher rather than pretending to be a desktop browser. Some sites serve a bot-protection page to anything that looks like Chrome arriving without a human behind it, which is how a perfectly good feed gets misdiagnosed as dead.

6. Before you commit: check the feed is actually worth having

A URL that returns XML isn't automatically a good source. Two things to look at:

• Does it still update? Plenty of feeds haven't seen a new item since 2019. Check the date on the newest entry.
• Full text or teaser? Many publishers put the first paragraph in the feed and a "read more" link. That's their call, and worth knowing before you subscribe to forty of them and wonder why your reader feels thin.

The takeaway

The feed is usually there. Try the six URLs, and if that fails, view the source and search for alternate — between them you'll find almost everything. For the platforms, learn the handful of patterns above; they don't change often.

Or skip all of it: start free, paste the addresses of the sites you already read, and import your OPML if you're coming from another reader. Finding the feed is the boring part — what you do with the ranking afterwards is the interesting one.