---
title: "RSS Feed (feed.xml)"
description: "Continuous discovery for new and updated pages."
canonical: "https://geordy.ai/formats/rss"
---
# RSS Feed

**Continuous discovery for new and updated pages.**

An XML feed of every new or recently-updated page on your site, with full content embedded. AI crawlers poll it instead of guessing when to re-crawl.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format for publishing frequently updated content in a standardized, machine-readable stream that AI systems and aggregators can monitor for new content.

## At a glance

- File: `feed.xml`
- First released: 1999
- Created by: RSS Advisory Board (originally Netscape)
- Specification: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
- Read by: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Feed readers, AI training pipelines

## Why it matters for AI

RSS is the canonical machine-readable format for publishing a stream of dated content, and AI engines and crawlers use feeds as a low-cost, high-signal way to discover new and updated items without re-crawling a whole site. Each item carries a stable guid, pubDate, link and description, giving LLM ingestion pipelines clean, deduplicated, time-ordered context.

## Example

```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Geordy AI Optimization Updates</title>
    <link>https://geordy.ai</link>
    <item>
      <title>New Enterprise Formats Released</title>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
```

## Benefits

- Real-time content update notifications for AI systems
- Standardized format recognized by all major platforms
- Enables content distribution to AI training pipelines
- Improves freshness signals for time-sensitive content

## Best practices

- Always include guid (with isPermaLink="true" where possible) and an RFC 822 pubDate on every item so aggregators can de-duplicate and time-order entries.
- Provide a meaningful <description> per item (not just a title) and use entity-encoded HTML or CDATA for rich content.
- Auto-discover the feed from your HTML with `<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed.xml">` and validate output against the W3C feed validator.
- Keep the feed under a few hundred items, set <ttl> or HTTP cache headers, and reference the spec via <docs>https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>.

## Pitfalls

- Mutating or reusing guid values across edits, which causes aggregators to re-publish or drop items.
- Using non-RFC 822 dates (e.g. ISO 8601 like Atom) - RSS 2.0 requires RFC 822 date strings such as "Sun, 19 May 2002 15:21:36 GMT".
- Emitting invalid XML (unescaped ampersands, raw HTML in <description>, missing CDATA), which breaks strict parsers.

## Use cases

- **Blog and news updates** - Syndicate articles, posts, and news updates to subscribers and AI systems.
- **Product updates** - Notify AI systems about new products, features, or releases.
- **Podcast distribution** - Distribute podcast episodes with metadata and enclosures.

## Adopters

- BBC News (https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml)
- The New York Times (https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml)
- NPR News (https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml)
- Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)
- WordPress (https://wordpress.org/news/feed/)
---

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