Feed Tracking Mode: Structured Monitoring for RSS, Atom, and Sitemaps

Last updated: 11 April, 20266 min read

Feed tracking mode treats an RSS feed, Atom feed, or XML sitemap as a list of individual items rather than a single blob of text. Instead of "the page changed", you get "2 new posts added: [titles and links]". This matches how you actually want to consume a feed: item by item.

When to Use Feed Tracking Mode

Pick Feed mode when the URL you are monitoring is a structured list that updates over time:

  • RSS and Atom feeds (/feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feeds/posts/default, /index.xml)
  • XML sitemaps (/sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml)
  • GitHub release and commit Atom feeds (github.com/owner/repo/releases.atom)
  • Reddit subreddit feeds (reddit.com/r/subreddit/.rss)
  • Podcast feeds
  • Inventory grids and card-based HTML pages (detected via DOM pattern matching)

PageCrawl auto-detects the feed format when you paste the URL and switches to Feed mode automatically. You can also pick it manually from the tracking mode selector.

What You Get With Feed Mode

Compared to Full Page text tracking, Feed mode gives you:

Feature Full Page Text Feed Mode
Compares raw content Yes No (parses items)
Reports which items changed No Yes, with titles and links
Ignores reordering No (false alerts) Yes
Deduplicates by stable key No Yes (guid, id, link)
Caps item count No Yes (configurable limit)
Runs without a browser Only if page is plain text Yes, for XML feeds
Handles "No exact matches" fallbacks No Yes

The end result: fewer false alerts, clearer notifications, and lower monitoring cost per check.

Supported Formats

Feed tracking mode parses:

  • RSS 2.0 including <guid>, <enclosure>, <media:content>, and <content:encoded>
  • RSS 1.0 / RDF including rdf:about identifiers
  • Atom 1.0 including <link rel="alternate"> and <media:thumbnail>
  • XML Sitemap (<urlset>) and sitemap index (<sitemapindex>)
  • JSON Feed (jsonfeed.org/version/1)
  • Generic repeating XML when an XML file has a list-like structure

For HTML pages like product grids, inventory lists, or news listings, Feed mode falls back to DOM pattern detection, which identifies repeated card-like elements on the page and tracks them as items.

How Detection Works

When you paste a URL into Track New Page, PageCrawl performs a content-based check:

  1. Fetches the URL
  2. Looks at the content type and first few bytes of the body
  3. If it looks like XML, parses it with a namespace-aware XML parser
  4. Identifies the feed format (RSS / Atom / Sitemap / etc.) by root element
  5. Returns the detected format to the interface, which auto-switches to Feed mode

If the detection cannot classify the URL as an XML feed, the tracking mode stays at Full Page and you can switch to Feed manually if you want to use DOM pattern detection on an HTML page.

Item Limit

Every feed tracking element has a Track first N items cap. The default is 10 for new monitors. You can raise it up to your plan's maximum.

The limit exists for three reasons:

  1. Avoid noise from variable-count pages. Some pages show a different number of items between checks (inventory pages, infinite-scroll feeds). Capping at a fixed count prevents fluctuations from triggering false change alerts.
  2. Keep storage manageable. A sitemap with 50,000 URLs would create a 50,000-item JSON blob per check. The cap prevents this.
  3. Focus on fresh content. Most of the time you care about the newest items. Tracking the first 10-20 entries is almost always enough.

How "First N" Is Decided

For RSS and Atom feeds, "first N" means the first N items in document order, which is the convention these formats use to put the newest items at the top. Reading position 0 through N-1 gives you the N most recent posts.

XML sitemaps are different. There is no convention requiring sitemaps to list new URLs first. New pages can appear anywhere in the file, including appended at the bottom. To handle this, PageCrawl sorts sitemap entries by their <lastmod> date (newest first) before applying the cap, so the most recently modified URLs always win.

For sitemaps that do not include <lastmod> on every URL, the dated entries are sorted first and the dateless entries fall to the bottom of the sort in their original document order. If you need to track every page on a very large sitemap regardless of modification date, use Page Discovery instead - it auto-monitors new pages as they appear without depending on the position-based cap.

Plan Maximum Items Per Feed
Free 10
Standard 100
Enterprise 1,000
Ultimate 10,000

The default is 10 across all plans. You can raise it from the tracking mode panel any time after the monitor is created.

What Triggers a Change Alert

By default, Feed mode notifies you when items are added to the feed. You can also opt into:

  • Items removed – something disappeared from the feed
  • Content changed – an item's title or body was edited after publication
  • Price changed – an item's price updated (for product feeds)
  • Order changed – items were reordered (off by default since most feeds reorder as new items arrive)

Each item is identified by a stable key in this order: GUID → link → title. That means content changes on the same item are correctly recognized as updates, not as a new item.

Monitoring Frequency

Feed mode runs via a lightweight HTTP fetch without a browser, so you can check feeds frequently without burning through plan limits:

Feed Type Recommended Frequency
Security advisories Every 15 minutes
News and competitor blogs Every 30 to 60 minutes
GitHub release feeds Every 1 to 2 hours
Podcast feeds Every 6 to 12 hours
Sitemaps for large sites Every 1 to 4 hours
Low-volume blogs Daily

Note: if you raise the frequency below 30 minutes on a browser-only feed (an HTML inventory page rather than an XML feed), PageCrawl will use the browser engine for reliability.

Common Examples

GitHub release feed:

https://github.com/owner/repo/releases.atom

WordPress blog:

https://example.com/feed/

Reddit subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/.rss

Site sitemap:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

For each of these, paste the URL into Track New Page. PageCrawl detects the format, switches to Feed mode, and shows the first 10 items as a preview before you save.

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