Finding RSS Feeds on Sites That Hide Them

You find a blog with exactly the kind of writing you want to read regularly. The posts are thoughtful, the perspective aligns with your interests, and you know you’ll want to keep up with new articles. You look for an RSS icon, scan the header and footer, check the sidebar, and find nothing. The site doesn’t advertise a feed anywhere obvious.

This happens more often than you’d expect. Many websites still offer RSS feeds, but they don’t make them easy to find. Some bury the link in an obscure corner. Others include the feed in their HTML but don’t display it visually. A growing number of sites have removed RSS entirely, forcing you to rely on their homepage or social media for updates.

Before you give up and add the site to your bookmarks to check manually, there are several techniques worth trying. Most websites that publish articles regularly still generate feeds behind the scenes, even if they don’t promote them.

Check the page source for feed links

The fastest way to discover a hidden RSS feed is to look at the HTML source of the website. Many sites include feed discovery links in the head section of their pages, even when they don’t display an RSS button anywhere visible.

Open the site in your browser, right-click, and select “View Page Source” or press Ctrl+U. Then search for “rss” or “feed” or “application/rss”. You’ll often find a line that looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://example.com/feed/" />

That URL is your feed. Copy it and paste it into your RSS reader. This method works on a surprising number of blogs and news sites that don’t advertise their feeds prominently. WordPress sites in particular almost always include this link, even when the theme doesn’t display an RSS icon.

Try common feed URL patterns

Most content management systems follow predictable patterns for feed URLs. If you can’t find a feed link in the source, try appending common paths to the site’s domain. For WordPress sites, these URLs often work:

• /feed/
• /rss/
• /rss2/
• /atom/
• /feed/rss/
• /feed/atom/

So if the site is example.com, try example.com/feed/ in your browser. If you see XML content or a feed reader prompt, you’ve found it. Other platforms have their own conventions. Medium uses /feed for user profiles. Substack sites typically have a RSS link in their footer, but the direct URL pattern is usually subdomain.substack.com/feed.

Ghost blogs often use /rss/ or /feed/. Squarespace sites typically support /?format=rss. These patterns aren’t universal, but they cover a large portion of the blogging landscape.

Use browser extensions for feed detection

Several browser extensions exist specifically to detect RSS and Atom feeds on pages. Feedly’s extension, RSS Subscription Extension, and Feedbro all scan the current page for feed links and display an icon when they find one. These tools save you from manually inspecting source code and can detect feeds even when the URL patterns are non-standard.

The advantage of using an extension is that it works across any site you visit. You don’t need to remember the various URL patterns or hunt through HTML. The extension does the work and presents you with available feeds, often showing multiple options if a site offers both RSS and Atom formats.

Look for feeds on archive or listing pages

Some sites only include feed links on specific pages rather than the homepage. Check the blog archive page, category pages, or author pages. A site might not advertise a site-wide feed but could offer feeds for individual categories or tags. This can actually be more useful, since it lets you subscribe only to the topics you care about within a broader site.

For example, a tech publication might cover everything from AI to programming languages to hardware reviews. Instead of subscribing to their entire feed, you might find a category feed for just the topics that interest you. Look for category URLs like /category/programming/ and then try appending /feed/ to see if a category-specific feed exists.

Search for the site’s feed directly

When all else fails, try searching for the site name along with “RSS feed” or “subscribe”. Sometimes the feed URL is documented in a help section, FAQ, or about page that isn’t immediately obvious. Community forums or Reddit threads about the site might also mention the feed URL.

You can also search for the site’s domain along with “site:reddit.com rss” to find discussions where others have already figured out the feed. The RSS community is active and helpful, and chances are someone has already solved this problem for popular sites.

Consider feed generation services for sites without feeds

Some websites genuinely don’t offer RSS feeds. Social media platforms mostly abandoned RSS years ago. News sites sometimes remove feeds to drive traffic through their apps or social channels. For these cases, feed generation services can bridge the gap.

Tools like RSS.app, Feed43, and PoliteRSS can create RSS feeds from websites that don’t natively support them. These services monitor a page, extract new content, and format it into a feed you can subscribe to. The quality varies depending on the site’s structure, but for many cases it works well enough to keep you updated without manual checking.

Be aware that these services often require paid subscriptions for reliable use, and they add another dependency to your reading pipeline. They’re worth considering for sites you truly want to follow, but I’d recommend exhausting the free options first.

Why finding feeds matters

The effort to locate hidden feeds pays off in sustained attention management. When a site is in your RSS reader, you encounter its content alongside your other sources in a consistent format. You’re not switching between tabs, fighting with different layouts, or getting distracted by homepage clutter. The reading experience stays uniform, and your attention stays focused on the content rather than the container.

More importantly, having a site in your feed reader means you see new posts when they arrive, not when you remember to check. This passive discovery is one of RSS’s core benefits. You don’t need to maintain a mental list of sites to revisit. Your reader handles the monitoring, and you handle the reading.

Develop a routine for feed discovery

I keep a running list of sites I want to follow but haven’t added yet. When I have a few spare minutes, I pick one or two from the list and try to find their feeds using the methods above. It doesn’t take long once you develop the habit. Most sites yield their feeds within a minute or two of looking.

Over time, you build a personal mental map of which platforms use which URL patterns. WordPress sites become second nature. You learn which platforms require extensions and which can be solved with simple URL guessing. The process becomes faster and more intuitive.

The key is not letting a missing RSS icon stop you from following a source you value. With a bit of detective work, most sites will reveal their feeds. And for the ones that don’t, you at least know you tried before resorting to manual checking or third-party services.

Your feed reader is only as good as the sources you put into it. Taking the time to find feeds for the sites you care about transforms your reading experience from reactive to intentional. You control what shows up, when it arrives, and how you engage with it. That control is worth the few minutes it takes to hunt down a hidden feed URL.