RSS looks dead because the reader apps mostly disappeared. The feed itself never stopped being useful — it just moved to consumers you don’t see in your analytics.

Who’s actually reading your feed

Human feed readers didn’t vanish, they consolidated. Feedly, NetNewsWire, and Inoreader still have real, loyal user bases — smaller than 2010, but higher-intent than almost any other traffic source, because someone who subscribes to your feed chose to see every post you write, no algorithm involved.

Then there’s everything that isn’t a human:

• Newsletter tools (Buttondown, ConvertKit, Substack’s RSS-to-email) poll your feed to auto-send new posts.
• Automation platforms (Zapier, IFTTT, n8n) use it as the trigger for cross-posting to social, Discord, Slack.
• Aggregators like Hacker News’ second-chance pool, or niche industry digests, pull from feeds to find new content to surface.
• AI crawlers and LLM ingestion pipelines increasingly prefer a clean, structured feed over scraping rendered HTML — it’s cheaper for them to parse and less likely to include your nav bar and footer as noise.

That last one matters more every quarter. A feed is a machine-readable table of contents for your entire site, dated and ordered. That’s exactly the shape a crawler wants.

Hugo generates one automatically — check it’s not broken

Hugo ships RSS/Atom output by default at /index.xml. Verify it’s actually populated:

curl -s https://yoursite.com/index.xml | grep -c '<item>'

If that’s 0 on a site with posts, something’s wrong in your taxonomy or output format config, not a Hugo limitation.

Make the feed worth subscribing to

Full content, not a teaser. A feed that only shows the first two sentences and forces a click to a page full of ads or popups trains people to unsubscribe. In hugo.toml, make sure your feed template renders .Content, not .Summary, unless you have a specific reason to truncate.

Link to it, visibly

Most sites bury the RSS link in the footer in 10px gray text, or don’t link it at all and rely on browsers/readers auto-discovering the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> tag in <head>. Do both — the auto-discovery tag for tools that look for it, and a visible link for humans who want to find it.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      title="Your Blog" href="/index.xml">

Set a real lastmod

If your feed items don’t update their timestamp when you edit a post, subscribers and crawlers alike see it once and never revisit it, even after a substantial rewrite. Hugo tracks this via front matter lastmod or git-based lastmod if you enable it — worth turning on if you update old posts.

An RSS feed costs nothing to maintain once it’s working and it’s one of the few distribution channels you fully own — no algorithm, no platform risk, no ad auction between you and the reader. Don’t let “nobody uses RSS anymore” talk you out of the one channel that was never actually gatekept.