Apple Podcasts Chart Monitor: New Entries and Drops

Get Apple Podcasts' Top Shows or Top Episodes chart for any store country, and on every scheduled run only what changed: new entries, drops and rank moves. Each row is one show (or episode) with its rank, publisher, genres and Apple Podcasts page. Turn on monitoring, run it daily, and a quiet day returns nothing and costs nothing.

Related actors: to look a single show up by Apple id, with its feed URL and latest episodes, use Podcast Lookup. This actor is about the charts.

Who uses it

• Podcast networks and agencies watch whether a client show or a competitor's enters or leaves the top 25 in a country, without opening the app every morning.
• Brand and sponsorship teams get a daily list of shows that just broke into a genre chart, which is the moment a show is worth pitching.
• Newsletters, data journalists and trend trackers schedule it per country and drop the new entries into Sheets, n8n, Make or Slack.

How to use

1. In the Apify Console. Open the actor page and click Start — the countries field is already pre-filled with a working example. Results land in the run's dataset as soon as each item is found.
2. Via the API. Call it directly with a POST request — no Console needed once you have an API token:

   curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~apple-podcasts-chart-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
     -X POST \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"countries":["us"]}'
   

3. On a schedule. Save this actor as an Apify Task with the input you want, then add a Schedule (hourly, daily, weekly) so it runs on its own — no server of your own required.

Input

{
  "countries": [
    "us"
  ]
}

One two-letter Apple store country code per line. Each country gets its own chart and its own monitoring memory. Accepted formats: us, gb, de.

One run covers every country you list, one chart per country, each with its own monitoring memory. Entries are the country's chart as Apple publishes it: the feed refreshes daily and holds at most the top 100, so a chart watch is a top-100 watch.

Genre. Apple's chart feed has no genre parameter, so the genre field filters the country's top 100 by genre name or id (News, True Crime, Comedy, 1489 ...). rank counts inside that genre, overallRank keeps the position in the country's chart. On the episodes chart Apple prints genre names in the store's language and without an id, so type the name as it appears.

Chart size. limit is how many entries you watch (1 to 100). Monitoring compares that top N between runs, so a show that slides from rank 20 to rank 30 on a top-25 watch is reported as dropped.

Monitoring: entries, drops and moves

Switch on Only return entries and drops since the last run, or just give the watchlist a name, and the actor remembers each country's last chart in a key-value store of its own. From the second run on:

chartStatus	Meaning	Returned and billed with monitoring on
BASELINE	The first monitored run: the whole chart, so you have the starting point	yes, once
NEW_ENTRY	In the chart now, not in the last run's chart	yes
DROPPED	In the last run's chart, gone now (rank is null, previousRank says where it was)	yes
UP / DOWN / UNCHANGED	Still on the chart; rankChange is the places climbed (negative = fell)	no, only in the full-chart mode below

With monitoring on and nothing entered or dropped you get one row with monitorStatus: NO_CHANGES and entryCount: 0, and you are not charged. A name without the checkbox (a tracked watchlist) returns the full chart every run, stamped with each entry's movement.

Output

One row per chart entry, for example:

query	found	status	country	chart	genreFilter	chartSummary	entryCount	monitorStatus	feedGeneratedAt	sourceUrl	entries	rank	overallRank	id	name	artistName	genres	explicit	artworkUrl	url	chartStatus	previousRank	rankChange	isNew	firstSeenAt	scrapedAt
us	true	OK									<all chart entries (full list)>													<is this a new entry?>		1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

A country with no chart comes back as a row with "found": false and is never charged. Values Apple does not publish are null, never 0 or an empty string. explicit is true when Apple flags the title and null otherwise, because the feed never says "clean". Every row carries the Apple Podcasts page in url, the feed it came from in sourceUrl, and scrapedAt.

Real rows from the US Top Shows chart on 2026-10-11:

rank	name	artistName	genres	url
1	The Daily	The New York Times	News	https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736
2	In The Dark	The New Yorker	True Crime, Society & Culture	https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-dark/id1148175292
3	Crime Junkie	Audiochuck	True Crime	https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crime-junkie/id1322200189

Pricing

• Chart entry returned: $3 per 1,000 entries

Plus a $0.003 start fee per run. Each event above is billed independently, only when it actually returns data - misses (found:false) are never charged.

A top-25 chart is 25 entries. A monitoring run that finds no new entries and no drops is free.

Example runs

Paste any of these into the Input tab and press Start. All three return rows with no key, no token and no account of your own beyond an Apify login.

US Top Shows, top 25. The default shape.

{
  "countries": ["us"],
  "chart": "shows",
  "limit": 25
}

True Crime inside the UK and German top 100, monitored. Run it daily as a schedule; the first run is the baseline, later runs return only entries and drops.

{
  "countries": ["gb", "de"],
  "chart": "shows",
  "genre": "True Crime",
  "limit": 25,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "deltaName": "true-crime-eu"
}

Top 10 episodes in France.

{
  "countries": ["fr"],
  "chart": "episodes",
  "limit": 10
}

Use it from Clay, n8n, Make, or an AI agent

This actor runs synchronously over plain HTTP — call it directly from a script, a workflow tool, or an AI agent, no Apify Console needed once you have an API token.

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~apple-podcasts-chart-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"countries":["us"]}'

n8n. Add an HTTP Request node: Method POST, URL https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~apple-podcasts-chart-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>, Body Content Type JSON, JSON Body {"countries":["us"]} (swap in an expression from an earlier node for a real value).

Clay. Add an "HTTP API" column: Method POST, URL https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~apple-podcasts-chart-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>, Body {"countries":["{{country chart}}"]}, mapping the row's country chart into the countries array.

MCP. In Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client with the Apify MCP server, ask for "apple podcasts chart tracker" — the agent will find and run this actor.