Most sites still publish a feed. This guide is how you find it in under a minute, even when the publisher hides the link.
Every RSS reader asks the same question when you add a source: what is the feed URL? For many sites the answer is one click away. For others the link is deliberately buried or removed, even though the feed itself still works perfectly. Here is the order of checks I run, fastest first, refined after adding thousands of feeds by hand.
First: look for the standard link
Publishers still following the basics place a feed link somewhere predictable: the footer, the sidebar, or under a share menu. It is usually labelled RSS, Feed, Subscribe, or an orange broadcast icon. If you find it, copy that URL directly and you are done.
Second: try the conventional paths
Feed software converges on a handful of default locations, so guessing works often enough to be worth trying before anything clever. (Or skip the guessing entirely: the RSS Feed Finder tool tests the page markup and all of these paths automatically.)
- /feed, the most common default, used by WordPress and most blogging platforms.
- /feed/ with a trailing slash, the same feed on some configurations.
- /rss or /rss/, the second most common convention.
- /feed.xml or /index.xml, used by static site generators and Jekyll-style blogs.
- /atom.xml, used by older academic and hand-maintained sites.
Append each to the site root, not to an article URL. If any returns XML rather than a 404 page, that is your feed. If the site redirects to a login page, keep looking.
Third: read the autodiscovery tag
Nearly every publishing system embeds the feed location in the HTML of every page, whether or not it links it visibly. View the page source and search for application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml. The surrounding tag gives you the exact feed URL:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed">
This works on news sites, magazines, and documentation sites that removed their visible subscribe button. On mobile, desktop-mode usually reveals the same source.
Fourth: check the sitemap and the channel pages
For sites with sectioned content, the root feed is often only the front page. Look at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml; news sitemaps frequently list per-section feeds next to page groups. YouTube channels, podcast hosts, and Substack publications all follow this pattern: one master feed plus per-series children.
When a site genuinely has no feed
Some publishers have removed RSS entirely. In that case you have three options. Check whether a mirror or aggregator republishes the content as a feed; several news sites are syndicated through third-party feeds. Use the site's email newsletter if it exists, because it is the same content with the same schedule. Or accept that the source cannot be added, and replace it: publications that still publish feeds are usually the ones worth reading anyway.
How this works inside Curated Feeds
The app accepts anything that parses as RSS 2.0, Atom, or RDF, so the URL you find here can be pasted straight into the add-source field. There is no account and no directory approval: if the URL resolves, it is added. If you subscribe to a broken feed by mistake, remove it from the source list and nothing else is affected.
Finding a feed is a mechanical skill, and it gets faster every time you do it. After a few weeks of adding sources you will stop running the checklist and simply try /feed first, because it works most of the time.