Validating RSS and Atom Feeds Before You Publish

A feed that looks fine to you can still fail for every subscriber, because feed readers are unforgiving. Validation catches these problems before publish, and it starts with one rule: the document must be well-formed XML. A single unescaped ampersand, a missing closing tag, or an encoding mismatch makes the entire feed unparseable, so that check comes first.

Once the XML parses, each format has required elements. RSS 2.0 requires the channel to have a title, link, and description, and every item needs a title or description. Atom is stricter: the feed and every entry must each have an id, title, and updated. Missing any of these is a hard error.

Beyond the required set sit recommendations: an item without a guid will be hard for readers to deduplicate, and a missing link makes it harder to click through. Treat those as warnings. Fix the errors, address the warnings you care about, re-validate, and the feed is safe to hand to readers, podcast directories, and search engines.