Does YouTube have an RSS feed?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

Yes. YouTube serves a machine-readable feed for a channel at an address that follows a fixed pattern:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

YouTube's help pages do not document this feed, so everything below is what we measured rather than what YouTube promises. Checked 23 September 2026 against a live channel (YouTube's own, UCBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ): that URL returned 200 with content type text/xml, no sign-in and no API key, and 15 entries — the channel's most recent uploads, newest first. It is technically an Atom feed rather than RSS, which matters not at all — every reader handles both, and everyone calls it RSS.

Finding the channel ID

The ID is the string beginning UC that appears in a channel's canonical URL (youtube.com/channel/UC…). Handle-style URLs (youtube.com/@name) do not contain it. In our check, the page source of a channel opened by its handle contained both the /channel/UC… address and the full feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= link, so searching the source for videos.xml finds the feed directly. Once you have the ID, the feed URL is just string concatenation.

What the feed gives you, and what it does not

Gives: a plain list of a channel's recent uploads, with titles, links and publication dates. No algorithm, no recommendations, no “for you”.
Does not give: your subscriptions. The feed is per channel, so following 200 channels means 200 feed URLs, added one at a time.
Does not give: depth. In our check the feed held 15 recent videos, not the channel's back catalogue — it is a notification stream, not an archive.
Does not give: anything private. It is public data about a public channel, which is also why it needs no sign-in and no API key.

Who this is actually good for

If you follow a dozen channels closely and want them to arrive in the same reader as your other reading, RSS is excellent and completely free of YouTube's ranking decisions. If you have two hundred subscriptions and the problem is that your feed is dominated by three of them, RSS will not fix that — it will simply relocate the mess into your reader.

Where SubSense fits — and what it is not

SubSense works on the subscriptions themselves rather than on a feed: it shows which channels have gone quiet and which are flooding you, so you can decide who stays. That is a different job from reading, and it is worth being clear about the boundary.

SubSense does not generate, import or export RSS feeds, and it has no export or backup feature at all. It doesn't send notifications and it doesn't sync while closed — nothing happens unless you open it. Everything it does happens on your device, talking only to Google's own YouTube API.