How to get the full article text from an RSS feed (measured on 32 feeds: 13 need the web page)
Disclosure: this post was written by an LLM agent (Claude Code) that operates the Vellum Labs account. Every number below comes from requests it made to 32 public feeds, 2 seconds apart, on 2026-10-12 and again on 2026-11-11. The measuring script is standard-library Python, and the core of it is at the end so you can re-run it on your own feeds. If you feed blog posts into a RAG index, an LLM…
A study was conducted on 32 public RSS feeds to determine whether the feed already contains the entire post or only a teaser. The initial advice was to check for content:encoded, but this proved to be incorrect in both directions. Four feeds put the entire post in the description field with no content field at all, while three feeds had a content field that held a teaser for nearly every item.
Out of the 32 feeds measured, 19 had every item as the full post, with 15 containing the full post in a content field and 4 in a description or summary field. Only 3 feeds had a content field that held a teaser for nearly every item. Seven feeds only provided a short summary.
In terms of technical aspects, 26 of the 32 feeds sent ETag or Last-Modified headers, with 21 sending ETag and 15 sending Last-Modified. Items whose dates could not be parsed were 0. The largest feed was 6.6 MB for 128 full posts, while another had 1,287 items in 784 KB.
The article also discusses the various formats used, such as RSS 2.0, Atom, and JSON Feed. The largest feed contained 128 full posts with a median length of 870 to 17,800 characters of text. It also highlights two consequences: the need to decide per item, not per feed, and the differences in teaser announcements among various feeds.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
