RSS and Atom Feeds: Let Readers and Apps Follow Your Site
A feed is a machine-readable list of a site’s newest posts: title, link, date and a summary or the full text. RSS and Atom are the two common formats. Feed readers (Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire), podcast apps, newsletter tools and news aggregators read feeds to show new content as soon as it’s published.
Why it matters
- Loyal readers. People who follow sites in a feed reader see every new post without relying on social media algorithms or search.
- Automation. Newsletter services can turn a feed into a weekly email, and tools like Zapier can post new articles to social channels.
- Podcasts are distributed entirely through RSS.
- Discovery. Some aggregators and search features read feeds to find fresh content quickly.
A feed doesn’t affect rankings directly, and a site without posts or news (a single product page, a small business brochure site) doesn’t need one.
What we check
We look for feeds the page announces in its <head>:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog" href="/feed.xml" />
| Result | When |
|---|---|
| Pass | the page links to at least one RSS or Atom feed |
| Info | no feed is announced (fine for sites without posts) |
We list up to five feed addresses. We don’t download the feed itself: a passive scan only reads the page. This check informs; it doesn’t change the SEO score.
How to add a feed
- Generate the feed. WordPress publishes one at
/feed/automatically. Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, Next.js and most other platforms have a built-in option or a small plugin. - Announce it on every page with the
<link rel="alternate">tag above, in the<head>. Useapplication/atom+xmlfor an Atom feed. Give each feed atitleif there are several (for example “Blog” and “Podcast”). - Keep it useful. Include the last 10–20 items, absolute links, and the publish date of each. A summary is fine; the full text is friendlier to feed readers.
- Validate it with the W3C Feed Validation Service before announcing it.
If the site has a blog section, also link the feed visibly (an RSS icon or “Subscribe” link), so
people who don’t know about the <link> tag can find it too.