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Discoverability

Should my site publish an RSS feed

A feed is the one distribution channel you own outright — no algorithm decides who sees it, and it keeps working when a platform changes its mind. Aggregators and newsletter tools pull from it, and several AI answer engines use it to discover new pages faster than a crawl would.

What 13x checks

This is rule discoverability.feed in the public registry: Published content offers a feed. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Discoverability
Score weight
3 of the readiness score
Scope
Runs on every audited page
Applies
Only where the market or the page shape makes it relevant

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

Publish a feed and link it from every page.

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

A minimal, valid RSS 2.0 document:

xml code
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>example.com</title>
    <link>https://example.com</link>
    <description>What you publish here</description>
    <atom:link href="https://example.com/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <item>
      <title>Post title</title>
      <link>https://example.com/blog/post-slug</link>
      <guid isPermaLink="true">https://example.com/blog/post-slug</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description>A summary, or the full post in a CDATA block.</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Two details that break feeds in practice: pubDate must be RFC-822 (not ISO 8601), and guid must never change once published — readers use it to decide what is new, so a regenerated guid re-notifies every subscriber about every post.

Framework-specific versions

Where the change differs enough to be worth writing out separately.

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