---
title: "JSON Feed (feed.json)"
description: "RSS, but JSON-native."
canonical: "https://geordy.ai/formats/json-feed"
---
# JSON Feed

**RSS, but JSON-native.**

A modern alternative to RSS, easier to parse for JSON-first pipelines. Useful for AI agents that consume live syndication without an XML parser.

JSON Feed is a modern syndication format introduced in 2019 leveraging JSON structure to deliver web content updates in a developer-friendly manner. Addresses the complexity of XML-based alternatives by offering straightforward machine readability, improved AI system monitoring, and seamless API integration.

## At a glance

- File: `feed.json`
- First released: 2019
- Created by: Brent Ashley, Ben Schwarz, Manton Reece
- Specification: https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/
- Read by: Modern AI agents, Developer-built RAG pipelines, JSON-first crawlers

## Why it matters for AI

JSON Feed delivers the same subscribe-to-updates capability as RSS or Atom but in plain JSON, so any modern client, serverless function, or LLM ingestion pipeline can parse it without an XML library. That low parsing cost makes it especially attractive for AI and agent crawlers that want a clean, typed list of recent posts to summarize or cite.

## Example

```
{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/2.0",
  "title": "Geordy AI Optimization Updates",
  "home_page_url": "https://geordy.ai",
  "items": [{
    "id": "https://geordy.ai/blog/enterprise-formats",
    "title": "New Enterprise Formats",
    "date_published": "2026-10-20T10:00:00Z"
  }]
}
```

## Benefits

- JSON-native - no XML parser needed
- Developer-friendly API integration
- Cleaner for modern web apps

## Best practices

- Always include the four required top-level fields - version (the URL `https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1`), title, items, and (recommended) feed_url and home_page_url - so consumers can self-identify and re-fetch the feed.
- Serve the feed as `Content-Type: application/feed+json` and link to it from your HTML with `<link rel="alternate" type="application/feed+json" href="...">` for autodiscovery.
- Give every item a stable, globally unique `id` (a permalink URL is the conventional choice) so readers can de-duplicate across renames.
- Prefer `content_html` for rich content and `content_text` for plain text; provide `date_published` in RFC 3339 format and a `url` that points to the canonical post.

## Pitfalls

- Using a non-stable `id` (e.g. a counter that resets when the site is rebuilt), which makes every post look new to subscribers.
- Setting `version` to a bare string like `"1.1"` instead of the required URL, which breaks strict parsers.
- Serving the feed as `application/json` only and forgetting `<link rel="alternate">` autodiscovery, so feed readers never find it.

## Use cases

- **Blog and news updates**
- **API-driven content**
- **Real-time notifications**

## Adopters

- Daring Fireball (https://daringfireball.net/feeds/json)
- Micro.blog (https://www.manton.org/feed.json)
- inessential.com (https://inessential.com/feed.json)
- Six Colors (https://sixcolors.com/feed.json)
- NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/)
---

Source: https://geordy.ai/formats/json-feed
This is a machine-readable markdown version of that page, generated by Geordy.