YouTube RSS feed: the URL, the channel ID, and what to do on a 404

The YouTube RSS feed for a channel lives at https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= followed by the channel's ID, which starts with UC. The format still exists, but the feed has gone down again and again since December 2025, so if you want to hear about new uploads without babysitting a reader, an AyeWatch YouTube monitor takes the channel link and sends the alert itself.

The two feed URLs

YouTube serves two feed shapes. Both return an XML feed when the service is up.

The @handle in a modern channel link will not work in place of the ID. Neither will a custom URL. The feed only accepts the UC string.

Three ways to get the channel ID

1. From the channel page. Open the channel, click "more" in the description, scroll to Share channel and pick Copy channel ID.
2. From the page source. On the channel's main page (not a video), view the source and search for rss. YouTube still puts a link tag there that points to the full feed URL, ID included. We found it on the Google Developers channel on November 4, 2026.
3. For your own channel. In YouTube settings, open Advanced settings. Google's help page says your user and channel IDs are listed there.

Paste the finished URL into any reader that accepts a feed address.

Why the feed returns 404

If every channel you follow fails at once, the problem is not your ID. YouTube's feed has a record of outages:

• December 2025: FreeTube users reported subscriptions failing to load, and a maintainer wrote that YouTube was having daily outages on the feeds.
• February 2026: ocaml.org's video scraper logged 404s on nine YouTube sources and traced them to a platform-wide outage. The issue closed on September 30 when the feeds returned 200 again.
• October 27, 2026: an Obsidian RSS plugin user saw every YouTube feed return 404.
• November 4, 2026: we requested the feeds for Google Developers and Linus Tech Tips with curl. Both came back 404, and so did a playlist feed.

We found no statement from YouTube about any of these, and no notice that the format is retired. Channel pages still link to it, but nobody can promise it will answer on a given day.

What the feed was never good at

Even on a good day, the feed has gaps. It mixes long videos, Shorts and live streams with no way to split them. It has no keyword filter, so a busy channel fills your reader with everything. And when it fails, a reader often just stops showing new items, so the channel seems to go quiet.

The alert version with AyeWatch

AyeWatch is not an RSS generator and gives you no XML feed URL. It does the job many people wanted the feed for: telling you when a channel posts.

• Create a monitor, choose YouTube, then Channel videos, Shorts, Live streams, Community posts or Search.
• Paste the channel link as it appears in your browser. Both youtube.com/@name and youtube.com/channel/UC links work, and no YouTube API key is needed.
• Add an "Only alert me about" instruction if you only care about certain videos, and AI reads each new post before deciding whether to alert you.

Alerts carry the video title and a link. They land in your AyeWatch feed and as push on iOS and Android with every plan; email, Slack, Discord and webhooks come with paid plans, which start at $9 a month. There is a free preview with no card. Comments are not read, and private or unlisted videos never show up.

When the raw feed is still the better pick

If you already read everything in an RSS app, want every upload from dozens of channels and do not mind the occasional dead week, the free feed is fine. When the feed is down, or when you only want the uploads that matter, set up an AyeWatch monitor instead.