Check the page source for a feed the site does not advertise, try the platform's own feed address, read the sitemap, and only then watch the page itself.
A website with no RSS feed on show usually still has a way to follow it. Look in the page source first, where a feed link can sit in the head with no button anywhere on the page. Then try the feed address the site's platform makes on its own, such as /feed/ on a WordPress site. After that, read the XML sitemap, which lists the site's pages and often the date each one changed, and at a shop, use a newest-first listing. If none of those exists, point a page monitor at the list you care about and get an alert when it changes.
A feed link lives in the page's code rather than on the page, so a site can offer a working feed without ever showing a button for it. The RSS Advisory Board's autodiscovery spec says the link "must be placed within a web page's head element", with rel="alternate" and a type of application/rss+xml. Atom feeds use application/atom+xml.
To find one, open the page, view the source (Ctrl+U in Chrome, Edge and Firefox) and search for alternate. On GOV.UK, for example, the news and communications search page, read on 15 September 2026, carries a link in its head with rel="alternate", the type application/atom+xml and the address /search/news-and-communications.atom. That address returns a live Atom feed. Paste that address into a feed reader and you are following the site.
If the source has nothing, try the address the site's platform generates, starting with WordPress. WordPress.com's feeds help page says: "To view the RSS feed URL of your site, add /feed/ to the end of your website's URL." The same pattern works lower down the site, which is often more useful than the whole-site feed.
| What you want to follow | Address to try |
|---|---|
| Every new post | example.com/feed/ |
| One category | example.com/category/features/feed/ |
| One tag | example.com/tag/themes/feed/ |
| One author | example.com/author/matt/feed/ |
| Comments on the whole site | example.com/comments/feed/ |
| Comments on one post | The post's own address with /feed/ on the end |
A 404 means the site is not on WordPress or the feed has been switched off. Try the sitemap next.
Often, yes. A sitemap is there so search engines can find every page, so it tends to be the most complete list of pages a site publishes. Find it in /robots.txt: the sitemaps.org protocol has sites add a line such as Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, and ours at stock-watch.co.uk does exactly that. Big sites split theirs up. The protocol caps each file at 50,000 URLs and 50MB, and lists the files in a sitemap index.
GOV.UK shows how big they get. On 15 September 2026 its robots.txt pointed to a sitemap index of 35 sitemaps, and the first of them held 25,000 URLs, almost all with a lastmod date.
Only partly. The protocol says it "must be set to the date the linked page was last modified, not when the sitemap is generated". In an index file, it is the date the sitemap file changed, which "does not correspond to the time that any of the pages listed in that Sitemap were changed". Not every site follows the rule, and Google's own sitemap guide says it only uses lastmod if it is "consistently and verifiably" accurate. A new URL appearing in the list is the stronger signal. A date moving on its own proves less.
Use the shop's own newest-first sort. On Shopify it is built in: Shopify's collection documentation lists created-descending among the sort values, labelled "Date, new to old" in its example sort menu. So /collections/all?sort_by=created-descending on a Shopify shop lists everything with the newest product first. Other platforms have their own version. On many shops, picking "newest" from a category's sort menu changes the address bar, and that new address is the one to watch.
A newest-first page is the best thing to watch at a shop, because a new product lands at the top and pushes everything else down. It is the same idea as following a company's careers page, where the jobs list is the part that matters and the rest of the page is noise.
Watch the page itself. Some feed readers can do this for you. Inoreader's Web Feeds turn a series of links on a page into a feed, and its Track changes option follows "visual or textual changes on a web page". A page monitor is the other way: you pick the part of the page that holds the list and get an alert when it changes.
Choose the smallest part that changes when something new appears, because on a whole page a rotating banner or a cookie notice will set it off. If you only care about one word appearing, such as "now open" or "new", watching for a specific word is tighter still. And keep the interval polite: how often you can check a website without getting blocked covers what a site's server sees.
View the page source and search for alternate
A link with type application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml is a feed. Paste its address into a feed reader.
Try the platform's feed address
Add /feed/ to a WordPress site's address, or to a category or tag page for a narrower feed.
Open /robots.txt and find the Sitemap line
Look for new URLs appearing in the sitemap rather than trusting every lastmod date.
At a shop, sort by newest
On Shopify, add ?sort_by=created-descending to a collection address.
Watch the list itself
Point a page monitor at the part of the page that holds the list, and choose where the alert goes.
For shops and pages, yes. A Shopify monitor reads the shop's own product data rather than a picture of the page, and with the whole-shop option off it watches the newest 100 products, so a new listing sends a new product alert. For any other page, the Visual Selector lets you click the list you want to follow and sends a change alert when its text changes. The Shopify monitor is on every plan, including Free, and so is the Visual Selector. The setup for each is in our Shopify help and our Visual Selector help. StockWatch is built for pages rather than feeds, so if the site has a working feed, a feed reader is the simpler answer.
View the page source and search for rel="alternate". The RSS Advisory Board's autodiscovery spec puts the feed link in the page's head, where you will not see it on the page. If nothing is there, try the platform's own address, such as /feed/ on a WordPress site.
Some feed readers will do it for you. Inoreader's Web Feeds turn a list of links on a page into a feed. The other route is a page monitor on the list, which sends an alert rather than adding an item to a reader.
No. A feed lists recent items with their content. A sitemap lists a site's pages for search engines, up to 50,000 URLs a file under the sitemaps.org protocol, with an optional lastmod date. It is often more complete than a feed, but it carries no content and its dates are not always accurate.
Some sites stamp every URL with the time the sitemap was built, which the protocol says not to do. Google says it only uses lastmod when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. A URL that was not in the list yesterday is a better sign something is new.
Add ?sort_by=created-descending to a collection address, for example /collections/all?sort_by=created-descending. Shopify's documentation lists created-descending as a sort value, shown as "Date, new to old".
Follow a page that has no feed Five monitors free, checked every 60 seconds. Alerts to email, Discord or Telegram.