Overview
News Discovery automatically finds and generates articles about trending topics in your niche. Instead of manually entering keywords, you configure monitoring rules and Publish Owl discovers stories for you — from web searches, RSS feeds, or both.
To get started, select News from the Create page (requires Standard+ plan), enter your news topics in the input step, and click Continue to access the workflow editor.
Discovery Methods
You can use one or both discovery methods together. Each method finds stories independently, and all discovered stories are processed through the same workflow.
Scheduled Web Searches
Publish Owl uses AI-powered search to find the latest news and content about your topic on a schedule.
- Search Query: Describe what to search for (e.g., "latest AI developments", "React framework updates")
- Search Provider: Choose which AI search to use:
- Perplexity (default) — with recency filter (day/week/month)
- OpenAI — supports domain filtering and user location
- Anthropic — supports domain filtering and user location
- Gemini — Google's AI search
- Grok (xAI) — includes X/Twitter search capability
- Search Timeframe: How far back to look — 24 hours, 48 hours, or 7 days
- Schedule Interval: How often to search (e.g., every 24 hours)
- Domain Filtering: Available for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini (not Perplexity or Grok). Include or exclude specific domains from results.
- User Location: Available for OpenAI and Anthropic only. Helps localize search results.
- Perplexity Recency Filter: Set to day, week, or month to control how recent results must be.
RSS Feed Triggers
Monitor RSS feeds for new items. When new entries appear, they can either be used directly as article topics or trigger a comprehensive web search to gather more coverage of each story.
- Feed URL: Any valid RSS or Atom feed URL
- Trigger Web Search: Optionally run a web search when new items appear, gathering broader coverage
Output Modes
Choose how discovered stories become articles:
Individual Articles
Generate one article per discovered story immediately. Each story becomes its own job.
- Daily Limit: Set a maximum number of articles per day to control costs
Digest / Roundup
Accumulate discovered stories and publish a single roundup article on a schedule (weekly or daily).
- Minimum Stories: How many stories must be collected before publishing a digest
- Below Threshold Behavior: What to do when not enough stories are found (skip, publish anyway, or wait)
Keyword Filters
Control which discovered stories get processed by filtering on keywords found in the story title and description.
- Include Keywords: Only process stories containing at least one of these words
- Exclude Keywords: Skip stories containing any of these words
Fetch Full Article Content
By default, your writing steps receive search summaries of discovered stories. Enable "Fetch full article content" to scrape the full text from discovered URLs, giving your workflow steps much richer source material to work with.
- ScrapingBee: Use your ScrapingBee API key for reliable scraping with JS rendering
- Free Scraper: No API key required, limited to 20 requests per hour
Best Practices
Start with a low daily limit
Set the daily article limit to 1-3 while testing. This lets you verify quality before scaling up and keeps costs predictable.
Enable full article fetching
Search summaries give your writing steps limited context. Fetching full article content produces significantly better output since the AI has more source material.
Use keyword filters to stay on-topic
Broad search queries can return off-topic results. Add include/exclude keyword filters to ensure only relevant stories make it through.
Combine search + RSS for best coverage
RSS feeds catch specific sources reliably, while web searches discover stories from across the web. Using both together gives the broadest coverage.
Troubleshooting
No stories being discovered
Check that your search query is broad enough. Very niche topics may not have recent coverage. Try expanding your search terms or increasing the timeframe from 24h to 7d.
Too many irrelevant stories
Add exclude keyword filters to block off-topic results. You can also narrow your search query or use domain filtering (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini) to restrict sources.
Articles not being generated
Check the daily article limit — you may have hit it. Also verify that your workflow steps have valid AI provider API keys configured in Settings.
Digest not publishing
If using digest/roundup mode, check the minimum stories threshold. The digest won't publish until enough stories have been collected.