How to Use RSS Feeds in Power Automate for Scheduled AI Content
I’ve got this weird little habit: I open my inbox before I’ve had a proper sip of coffee, and I immediately regret it.
It’s always the same story. Someone needs “fresh content” for a client. Something timely. Something that looks like a human cared. And they needed it yesterday… but also they want it every week… but also they don’t want to pay someone to sit there refreshing websites like it’s 2009.
That’s where RSS feeds quietly save the day. Not in a flashy way. More like a reliable mate who turns up on time and doesn’t talk about it.
If you’re a business owner or a marketing agency trying to use AI to dynamically create content on a schedule, RSS + Power Automate is one of the cleanest, least dramatic ways to do it.
RSS isn’t dead. It’s just not loud.
RSS has this reputation as an old internet thing—like forums, or email newsletters, or having attention span. But it’s still everywhere. Most blogs, news sites, and platforms publish RSS feeds because it’s a simple way to syndicate updates.
And that simplicity is the whole point. RSS is structured. Predictable. It doesn’t need brittle web scraping or a browser bot pretending to be a person.
For automation, that’s gold. You’re basically saying: “When this feed updates, do something.” And Power Automate is very good at “do something”.
Also—small detail—RSS is already a content pipeline. It’s literally a list of content items with titles, links, dates, and summaries. Which is exactly what your AI needs as input.
The basic flow: scheduled RSS → AI → publish
Let’s keep this grounded in something real. A common setup I build for agencies looks like this:
- Every morning at 7am, check a handful of RSS feeds (industry news, competitor blogs, client’s niche sites).
- Pull anything new since yesterday.
- Send the key bits to AI to draft content (LinkedIn post, email snippet, blog outline, whatever).
- Save drafts somewhere sensible (SharePoint, OneDrive, Airtable, Notion—pick your poison).
- Optionally notify a human for approval before anything goes live.
It sounds like a lot. It isn’t, once you’ve built it once. The trick is getting the RSS part clean and dependable—because if the input is messy, the AI output is… well, you’ve seen it. It starts talking like a motivational poster.
Power Automate gives you two main ways to start: a trigger that reacts to RSS updates, or a scheduled flow that checks feeds on a timer. For most businesses, I prefer scheduled. It’s calmer. Less twitchy. You control the cadence.
Start with a scheduled flow (yes, even if there’s an RSS trigger)
Create a new flow in Power Automate and choose Scheduled cloud flow. Set it to run daily (or hourly if you’re in a fast-moving niche). This makes your “AI content engine” predictable—and predictable is what clients pay for.
Then add the RSS action: List all RSS feed items. Drop in the feed URL.
This action pulls a batch of items and gives you fields like title, primary link, publish date, and summary. Most of the time, that’s enough to generate decent AI content.
If you want to get fancier, you can loop through multiple feeds. Just don’t get greedy at first. Pick one feed, make it work, then scale.
Filtering: because you don’t want to rewrite the entire internet
The first time you run “List all RSS feed items”, you’ll probably get a pile of items—some old, some new, some weirdly duplicated. That’s normal.
You need a simple way to decide what counts as “new”. There are two common approaches:
- Time-based filtering: only process items published in the last X hours/days.
- State tracking: store the last processed item (or date) somewhere and compare.
Time-based filtering is quick and fine for daily runs. State tracking is more robust—especially if a feed republishes items or updates old posts.
In Power Automate, you can store “last run” state in a SharePoint list, Dataverse, even a simple Excel table if you enjoy living dangerously. Then filter RSS items where the publish date is greater than your stored date.
And yes—date formats will annoy you. They always do. Take a breath, use a Compose action to normalise the date, and move on. This is the job.
When RSS fields aren’t enough: custom fields and XML wrangling
Here’s the part where people get stuck and start blaming Power Automate, RSS, or the moon phase.
Some RSS feeds include extra fields—categories, author names, featured images, custom tags—but they’re not always surfaced neatly in the default action output. You’ll see a blob of XML or HTML in the description and think, “Cool, cool… what am I meant to do with that?”
This is where converting XML to JSON saves you. The rough pattern looks like this:
- Use List all RSS feed items to get the raw item content.
- Add a Compose action to grab the XML (often in the item’s “summary” or “content” field).
- Convert that XML to JSON so you can pick out custom fields reliably.
Power Automate has an XML connector/action options depending on your environment, but even without fancy tools, you can often parse what you need with expressions once it’s JSON-shaped. The goal isn’t elegance. It’s stability.
Why bother? Because AI content gets better when you feed it better ingredients. A category tag like “Cybersecurity” or “Retail marketing” helps your prompt stay on-topic. An author name helps attribution. A featured image URL can become the post thumbnail automatically.
It’s the difference between “AI wrote some words” and “this looks like a system that knows what it’s doing”.
The 403 problem (and the stupid little fix)
Every now and then, you’ll run your flow and it’ll fail with a 403 Forbidden when trying to read a feed.
This is usually not personal. The site is blocking automated requests. Some feeds only allow access if the request looks like it’s coming from a normal browser or a known reader.
The fix is often adjusting the User-Agent header.
Power Automate’s RSS action doesn’t always let you customise headers directly, so the workaround is to fetch the RSS feed using an HTTP action instead. In that HTTP request, set a User-Agent header like a standard browser string (or something polite and identifiable), then parse the response XML yourself.
Is it slightly annoying? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No. It’s just one of those reality-of-the-web things—like cookie popups and people still using “password123”.
Once you’ve got the feed content via HTTP, you can convert it from XML to JSON the same way and continue your automation.
Feeding the AI: prompts that don’t make you cringe
Let’s talk about the AI step, because this is where a lot of “automated content” goes off the rails.
The mistake is asking for “a post about this article” and hoping for magic. You’ll get bland summaries and the kind of tone that makes you want to apologise to your own audience.
Instead, give the AI a job with boundaries. Something like:
- Audience: “Write for UK-based retail business owners.”
- Format: “Create a 120–180 word LinkedIn post.”
- Angle: “Pull out one practical takeaway and one contrarian observation.”
- Source: include title, link, and a 2–3 sentence summary from the RSS item.
- Constraints: “No hashtags” or “max 3 hashtags”, “no exclamation marks”, “avoid corporate tone”.
If you want scheduled AI content that still feels human, you have to be a bit picky. You’re basically training the system to sound like you (or your client) without turning into a parody.
Also: don’t publish straight to the world on day one. Route it to drafts first. Let a human glance at it. Even five seconds of review catches the weird stuff.
Where the content goes: drafts, approvals, and not waking up to chaos
The safest “agency-grade” workflow is: generate → save draft → notify → approve → publish.
Power Automate makes this pretty painless. Save the AI output into:
- a SharePoint list (great for tracking status and approvals),
- a Word document in OneDrive,
- a Planner task with the draft in the description,
- or even an email to the client with “Approve/Reject” buttons.
If you’re publishing to social, you can still automate the last step—just keep a human in the loop until you trust the pipeline. I’ve seen one too many “scheduled posts” go out at the worst possible moment because nobody thought about context.
And context matters. RSS doesn’t know when the world’s on fire. Your automation doesn’t know when your client’s having a PR week from hell. You do.
What this looks like when it’s working
When RSS feeds power automation properly, it feels almost boring. Which is the dream, honestly.
Your content calendar stops being a fragile thing held together by late-night panic. You’re not hunting for ideas every Monday morning. You’re not copying links into Slack and saying “we should post about this” and then never doing it.
Instead, you’ve got a steady input of relevant updates, a consistent AI drafting process, and a place for humans to make small edits that add real voice.
It’s not “set and forget”. It’s more like “set and check”. Like the slow cooker of marketing—still needs a glance, but it’s doing the heavy lifting while you get on with the rest of your life.
And if you’re running an agency, that’s the bit that really matters. Not the tech. Not the novelty. Just the quiet relief of knowing something will get done, on time, without you having to chase it down like a runaway shopping trolley.
RSS feeds aren’t glamorous. They’re just steady. And sometimes steady is exactly what you need.