Most blogs and news outlets expose category-specific RSS feeds — a WordPress site’s “Tech” category lives at /category/tech/feed/, a Medium publication’s “Design” tag lives at a dedicated tag feed, even substacks expose section-level feeds. AI Content Generator’s Live News Mode can poll any of these URLs directly, which means you can build a campaign that ingests only a specific sub-cluster of a publication rather than the whole noisy main feed.
This tutorial walks through the entire workflow: how to find the category-specific feed URL on the most common publishing platforms, how to plug it into the Live News Mode RSS field, how to combine multiple category feeds into a single campaign, the cadence settings that work well at the category level, and the dedup rules that prevent overlapping coverage when two category feeds converge on the same story.
By the end you’ll have campaigns that follow specific topical sub-clusters across the web — “AI plugins on WP Tavern”, “Plugin reviews on Torque”, “Hosting deep-dives on Kinsta blog” — at a finer grain than a generic news search would give you.
How category RSS works across platforms
Three URL patterns cover 90% of category feeds on the web.
- WordPress —
/category/SLUG/feed/. Works on every WordPress site with RSS enabled. Sub-categories follow the same pattern:/category/parent/child/feed/. - Medium —
/feed/tag/SLUGon publications,/feed/@usernameon individual writers. Some publications expose section feeds at/feed/section/SLUG. - Substack —
/feedfor the whole publication. Section-level feeds are exposed only on Premium publications via custom URLs.
For each source you want to follow, find the category page in the browser, then append /feed/ (or check the source code for the <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”> tag that points to the canonical feed URL).
Step 1 — Open Live News Mode and pick RSS
Inside the campaign editor, open the Live News Mode panel, enable it, and switch News source to RSS. The RSS Feed URL textarea appears: paste your category feed URLs into it, one per line.
Step 2 — Mix multiple category feeds in one campaign
The RSS Feed URL textarea accepts any number of feeds. The plugin merges them into a single queue, applies dedup, and processes them in order of publication date. For a “WordPress plugins” campaign you might paste:
https://wptavern.com/category/plugins/feed/ https://torquemag.io/category/plugins/feed/ https://kinsta.com/blog/category/wordpress-plugins/feed/ https://wpengine.com/blog/category/plugins/feed/
Four feeds, each one already scoped to plugin-related content. The merged queue is much higher signal than a generic Google News search for “WordPress plugin”, because the publications themselves already curated their content.
Step 3 — Tune cadence for the merged volume
Below the RSS URL textarea, the Live News Mode panel exposes Max news items to fetch, Max posts per run, and News search window (hours). For category feeds the math is different than for general news search: each feed publishes 5–20 items per week, not per day. Tune the settings accordingly.
- Max news items to fetch: 30–50 (the merged queue across 4 feeds rarely exceeds this).
- Max posts per run: 3–5 (don’t drain the queue too fast or the schedule starves).
- News search window (hours): 72 (most category feeds keep items live for 3+ days; a narrower window misses good content).
Step 4 — Pick a title preset that fits the niche
The title presets dropdown (Keep original / SEO optimised / Engaging / Formal / Question) determines how the AI rewrites each item’s headline. For category-specific feeds, the original headlines are usually high-quality (the publications already SEO’d them), so “Keep original” with a light rewrite often outperforms aggressive rewriting.
Try “Keep original” for the first week; if Google Search Console flags duplicate titles, switch to “SEO optimised” which rewrites enough to differentiate but stays close to the original meaning.
Step 5 — Configure dedup across overlapping feeds
Four category feeds covering the same niche will overlap on big stories — WP Tavern and Torque both cover the same major plugin release. Anti-duplicates catches title-level overlaps; for content-level overlap, enable the Live News Mode setting “Skip items if the same source domain already published an article on this topic this week”.
The combination produces clean coverage: the first feed to break the story wins the queue, the others get suppressed automatically.
Step 6 — Verify with a test fetch
Click Run news fetch now. The plugin polls all four feeds, dedups, picks the top 3–5 items for the test batch and shows you the rewrites. Inspect them: are they on-topic? Do they cite the source clearly? Does the rewrite preserve the news without copying sentences?
If any feed produces consistently off-topic items, remove that feed from the list. If all feeds produce good content but the rewrite quality varies, refine the Extra AI instructions until the rewrites stabilise.
Pattern — building a category-feed network for a niche
The most efficient long-term setup is one campaign per topical sub-cluster, each campaign ingesting only the category feeds that match. For a WordPress blog covering AI plugins, hosting and security:
- Campaign “AI Plugins” → 5–8 category feeds scoped to AI/plugin content.
- Campaign “Hosting” → 4–6 category feeds from hosting blogs.
- Campaign “Security” → 4–5 category feeds from WP security publications.
Three campaigns, ~15 feeds total, each campaign producing 3–5 posts/day in its sub-cluster. The blog covers the niche comprehensively without any feed drift into unrelated topics.
Troubleshooting
- Feed URL returns 404 — the publication renamed its category. Find the new URL via the publication’s category page.
- Feed loads but no items appear in the queue — the feed is empty (publication paused) or the items are older than the News search window. Widen the window.
- Same story published twice from different feeds — Anti-duplicates was off. Switch to Strict.
- One feed dominates the queue — that publication outputs much more than the others. Either accept the imbalance or rebalance by adding more feeds from quieter publications.
- Some feeds return 403 (Cloudflare blocking) — read the dedicated WordPress + Cloudflare guide on RSS feed unblocking; usually a simple firewall whitelist for the AI Content Generator user agent.
You’re done
That’s the full category-feed workflow: find the category-specific RSS URL on each publication (WordPress, Medium, Substack all expose them), paste multiple URLs into the Live News Mode RSS Feed field, tune cadence for the merged volume, pick a title preset, configure dedup, verify with a test fetch.
From here the campaign follows your niche at a much finer granularity than generic news search. Every plugin release, every security advisory, every hosting comparison gets pulled, rewritten, cited and published — automatically, on the cadence you set. The editorial overhead drops to the weekly Friday review of which feeds added value and which should be pruned.