Google RSS feed blocked (503 Error / Automated Access Blocked) — Any workarounds?

Questions
1

:bullseye: What is your goal?

Hi everyone,

I have a daily scenario that collects news using the Google RSS feed. Today, it suddenly started failing with a 503 Service Unavailable error on the RSS module.

To troubleshoot, I replaced the RSS module with an HTTP module to fetch the feed URL directly. It worked a few times, but then it failed again. This time, I received a clear message stating that the request was blocked due to suspected automated access/scraping.

I have a few questions for the community:

Why did this suddenly happen? Did Google recently tighten its rate limits or anti-bot policies for RSS feeds?

Is it just me? Is anyone else experiencing this 503/blocking issue with Google RSS today?

What are the best workarounds? How can I bypass this block, or what alternative methods/services do you recommend for reliably fetching Google News RSS in Make.com?

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

:thinking: What is the problem & what have you tried?

Google RSS feed 503 Error

:clipboard: Error messages or input/output bundles

ConnectionError
Service Unavailable

Sorry... body { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; background-color: #fff; color: #000; }
Google
Sorry...

We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

See Google Help for more information.

Origin: HTTP

3

Welcome to the Make community!

  • What’s the link to the feed that you’re fetching?

  • How frequently is your scenario running?

  • Please provide a screenshot of the error message?

According to codewords.ai,

Google may rate-limit or block your IP if you hit the feed endpoint every minute. A 15-30 minute interval is safe for most use cases. For near-real-time monitoring, consider using a caching proxy.
– source

Hope this helps! If you are still having trouble, please provide more details.

— @samliew
P.S.: investing some effort into the tutorials in the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make!