Apple Podcasts Scraper: Shows, Ratings, Charts & Episodes

Scrape Apple Podcasts in one fast Actor, with no Apple account, login or API key:

• Search podcasts by keyword (up to 200 per term and country, in Apple's ranking order)
• Look up shows in bulk by Apple Podcasts URL or ID
• Top Podcasts charts by country and genre (rank 1 to 200)
• Ratings: star rating, total number of ratings and the 1-5 star histogram, plus update frequency (Daily, Weekly...)
• Show details: author, genres, RSS feed URL, episode count, latest episode date, explicit flag, 600x600 artwork
• Episodes (optional): the show's full public archive from its RSS feed, with audio URL, duration, release date, season and episode number, episode type, description, and transcript and chapter links (Podcasting 2.0), with Apple's own index as fallback
• Multi-country, date filter for episodes ("last 30 days")

No listener reviews, no owner emails or other personal data: just public show and episode metadata.

Pricing: $0.50 per 1,000 podcasts, $0.20 per 1,000 episodes

	This Actor	Typical Apple Podcasts scrapers on Apify
Podcast (with ratings)	$0.50 per 1,000	$3 per 1,000, or $50 per 1,000 for "directory" tools
Episode	$0.20 per 1,000	$3 per 1,000
Actor start	$0.0005 per GB of memory (256 MB default)	up to $0.005

You pay only for rows you receive. Max results, Max episodes per podcast and Max rows in total cap every run, and your Apify maximum cost per run is respected exactly.

Use cases

• Podcast guest booking and sponsorship research: find shows in your niche, compare them by ratings count, rating and update frequency.
• Chart tracking: schedule a daily run on the Top Podcasts chart per country and genre and track rank changes.
• Content and media monitoring: get the newest episodes of the shows you follow, with audio URLs ready for transcription.
• AI and RAG pipelines: collect episode descriptions, transcript links and audio URLs for indexing.
• Market research: measure a category (number of shows, ratings, publishing cadence) across countries.

Input examples

Search, with ratings:

{ "searchTerms": ["true crime", "startup"], "maxResultsPerQuery": 50 }

A show and its last 20 episodes:

{ "podcasts": ["https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lex-fridman-podcast/id1434243584"], "includeEpisodes": true, "maxEpisodesPerPodcast": 20 }

Top 100 Technology podcasts in the UK and Germany:

{ "chart": "top", "chartGenre": "1318", "countries": ["gb", "de"], "maxResultsPerQuery": 100 }

Empty input returns today's US Top 20 podcasts.

Output

Podcast row:

{
  "type": "podcast", "source": "chart", "rank": 1, "chart": "top podcasts us", "country": "us",
  "podcastId": 1200361736, "title": "The Daily", "author": "The New York Times",
  "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736", "feedUrl": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/Sl5CSM3S",
  "primaryGenre": "Daily News", "genres": ["Daily News", "News"], "episodeCount": 2764, "latestEpisodeDate": "2026-10-29T09:45:00.000Z",
  "explicit": false, "rating": 4.3, "ratingCount": 106069, "ratingHistogram": { "5": 77777, "4": 8651, "3": 5073, "2": 3987, "1": 10581 },
  "updateFrequency": "Daily", "artworkUrl": "https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/.../600x600bb.jpg"
}

Episode row:

{
  "type": "episode", "podcastId": 1434243584, "podcastTitle": "Lex Fridman Podcast",
  "title": "#503 – AI Crisis in Math: Navier-Stokes, Riemann Hypothesis & Complexity Theory",
  "releaseDate": "2026-10-26T22:52:28.000Z", "durationSecs": 13360, "season": null, "episodeNumber": null, "episodeType": "full",
  "audioUrl": "https://media.blubrry.com/takeituneasy/ins.blubrry.com/takeituneasy/lex_ai_math_ai_crisis.mp3", "audioType": "audio/mpeg",
  "audioBytes": 160582933, "link": "https://lexfridman.com/math-ai-crisis/", "description": "Ankur Moitra, Steven Brunton and Alex Kontorovich...",
  "transcriptUrl": null, "chaptersUrl": null, "source": "rss"
}

Inputs that fail (unknown ID, no results) are listed in the FAILURES record and the run continues.

How it works

Search, lookup and charts use Apple's public iTunes Search API and Top Podcasts RSS. Ratings come from the public show page. Episodes come from each show's own public RSS feed. Requests to Apple go through one polite lane (0.8 s spacing, automatic back-off on throttling), so runs stay reliable instead of failing on rate limits.

FAQ

Why are some ratings null? Very new or small shows have no ratings yet.

How many episodes can I get? All of them: the RSS feed contains the full archive for most shows. Apple's own index (fallback) has the latest 200.

Can I use it from the API, Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent (MCP)? Yes. Input is flat JSON, and output is a dataset you can download as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Related: Apple App Store Scraper, YouTube Transcript Scraper, RSS Feed Reader.