Scrape and summarize posts of a news site without RSS
Automate news article scraping from websites without RSS feeds. The workflow browses news sites, extracts article links, fetches full content, uses AI to summarize each article with key points and sentiment analysis, then exports structured data to Google Sheets for easy tracking and analysis.
Need to track news from sites without RSS feeds? This tutorial shows how to build a news scraping and summarization workflow in Needle that monitors websites and delivers daily digests.
Overview
The workflow scrapes news sites without RSS, extracts articles, summarizes them with AI, and saves to Google Sheets—automating news monitoring for sites that don't offer feeds.
Key Actions
- Scheduled Daily Trigger – Runs daily or weekly to check for new articles
- Website Scraping – Browses target news sites and extracts article listings
- Article Extraction – Reads full article content
- AI Summarization – Creates concise summaries with key points
- Google Sheets Export – Saves articles with summaries for easy review
What You'll Need
- Target News Sites – URLs of news sites to monitor (even without RSS) Tip: Works well for industry blogs, company news sections, niche publications
- Google Sheet – For storing articles and summaries
- Schedule – Daily, weekly, or custom frequency
How It Works
Every day (or on your schedule):
- The workflow visits your list of target news websites
- For each site:
- Scrapes the homepage or news section
- Identifies article links published since last check
- Extracts article URLs
- For each new article:
- Browses the full article page
- Extracts:
- Title
- Author
- Publish date
- Full article text
- Featured image
- AI summarizes the article:
- Headline: Article title
- Summary: 2-3 sentence overview
- Key Points: Bullet list of main takeaways
- Relevance Score: How relevant to your industry/interests (1-10)
- Data is saved to Google Sheets:
Date Source Title Summary Key Points URL Relevance 10/1 TechCrunch ... ... ... ... 8 - Optional: Slack notification with top articles of the day
Use Cases:
- Competitive intelligence gathering
- Industry news monitoring
- Market research
- Content curation
- Trend spotting
Wrap-up
With this Needle workflow, you can monitor any news site—even without RSS feeds—and get daily summaries of new articles saved to Google Sheets. Perfect for analysts, researchers, marketers, and anyone tracking specific industries or topics.