Podcast Search, Episodes & Charts API

Every episode of any podcast, as a flat table. Give this Actor an Apple Podcasts link, a bare Apple ID, an RSS feed URL or just a show's name — mixed together, in any order — and get one row per episode: the title, the full show notes, the audio file URL, the duration in seconds, the episode number, the publish date and the GUID. Each show also gets a row of its own: feed URL, categories, language, artwork, episode count, first and latest episode dates, and the publisher's public contact address. Add a country code and you get Apple's Top Shows chart; add a keyword and you get every show Apple can find for it.

No API key. No login. No podcast-host account. $0.40 per 1,000 episodes, proxy included, shows that could not be read are free, and a run that returns nothing costs nothing at all.

Try it in 30 seconds

{
  "podcasts": [
    "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110"
  ],
  "maxEpisodesPerPodcast": 50,
  "episodeSource": "rss",
  "country": "us"
}

One Apple Podcasts link, the fifty most recent episodes. A bare ID (1545953110), a feed URL (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/hubermanlab) and the plain name Huberman Lab all reach the same show.

Want the market rather than one show? {"charts": ["us", "gb"], "chartSize": 50}. Want a list? {"searchQueries": ["true crime"], "maxResultsPerQuery": 200}.

What comes back

One episode row per episode:

{
  "ok": true,
  "rowType": "episode",              // "episode" | "podcast" | "chart" | "diagnostic"

  "appleId": "1545953110",           // the join key across every row of this show
  "podcastTitle": "Huberman Lab",
  "title": "How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter",

  "episodeId": "ee502b96-aa66-11f1-ad04-5ff2fd270a25",   // the feed's GUID — dedupe on this
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-07T08:00:00.000Z",
  "durationSec": 7426,               // 2 h 3 m, from itunes:duration in any of its 3 formats
  "audioUrl": "https://traffic.megaphone.fm/SCIM5888935664.mp3",
  "audioType": "audio/mpeg",
  "audioSizeBytes": null,            // this host sends length="0", which is "not stated"
  "episodeNumber": 297,
  "seasonNumber": null,
  "episodeType": "full",             // "full" | "trailer" | "bonus"
  "explicit": false,

  "description": "Dr. Jared Rutter, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, is a leading expert on mitochondria…",
  "descriptionHtml": null,           // the same notes with their links, when you ask for them
  "link": "https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-mitochondria-control-your-metabolism-jared-rutter",
  "transcriptUrl": null,             // when the feed declares one (podcast:transcript)

  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/hubermanlab",
  "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?uo=4",
  "position": 2,                     // 1-based, newest first
  "country": "us",

  "error": null,
  "errorType": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-10T15:04:05.487Z",
  "source": "rss",                   // "rss" | "apple" | "both"
  "sourceUrl": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/hubermanlab"
}

And one podcast row per show, written before its episodes:

{
  "ok": true,
  "rowType": "podcast",
  "appleId": "1545953110",
  "podcastTitle": "Huberman Lab",
  "title": "Huberman Lab",
  "author": "Scicomm Media",
  "ownerEmail": "podcast-verification@scicommedia.com",   // from the feed; no Apple endpoint has it
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/hubermanlab",
  "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?uo=4",
  "websiteUrl": "https://www.hubermanlab.com",
  "language": "en",
  "categories": ["Health & Fitness", "Science", "Life Sciences"],   // the feed's own tree
  "genres": ["Health & Fitness", "Podcasts", "Science", "Life Sciences"],  // Apple's
  "explicit": false,
  "podcastType": "episodic",
  "episodeCount": 440,
  "latestEpisodeAt": "2026-09-10T08:00:00.000Z",
  "firstEpisodeAt": "2020-12-21T05:22:00.000Z",
  "copyright": "Copyright © 2021-2025 Scicomm Media LLC",
  "artworkUrl": "https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/042e6144-725e-11ec-a75d-c38f702aecad/image/…jpg",
  "rating": null,                    // 4.8 when includeRating is on — one extra request per show
  "ratingCount": null,
  "resolvedFrom": "apple-id",        // "apple-id" | "feed-url" | "search" | "chart"
  "source": "both"
}

A chart row is one position in a country's Top Shows chart — rank, podcastTitle, author, genres, appleId, url, artworkUrl — and with includeChartDetails it also carries the show's feedUrl, episodeCount and latestEpisodeAt.

Every row carries the same columns, so podcasts, episodes, charts and diagnostics export as one rectangular table.

Use cases

• Feed monitoring at scale. A scheduled run over a few hundred shows, keyed on episodeId, gives you every new episode within the hour — with the audio URL already resolved, ready to hand to a transcription pipeline.
• Building a podcast database. searchQueries with a genreId returns 200 shows a query, each with its feed URL, categories, artwork and episode count. That is a directory, not a page of search results.
• Chart tracking. charts: ["us","gb","de","au"] on a daily schedule is a time series of who is climbing, in four markets, for a fraction of a cent a day.
• Competitive and publishing analysis. firstEpisodeAt, latestEpisodeAt and episodeCount on one row tell you cadence and whether a show has quietly stopped. Compare durationSec distributions across a genre and you can see a format changing.
• Ad and sponsorship research. Show notes are where the sponsor links live. Turn on includeDescriptionHtml and the anchors come through with them.
• Content and LLM pipelines. Titles plus show notes plus duration plus publish date, as a flat array — a labelled corpus without the labelling. transcriptUrl points at a transcript when the publisher declares one.
• Podcast guest and outreach research. ownerEmail is the address the publisher put in their own feed for exactly this purpose, and websiteUrl is where the rest of their contact details are.

How it works, and why it keeps working

There is no single podcast API, because a podcast is not one thing: the catalogue is Apple's, and the episodes are the publisher's, served from their own feed. This Actor reads all three public surfaces and merges them.

Source	What it reads	Shape
iTunes search	itunes.apple.com/search?media=podcast&entity=podcast	JSON. Shows by keyword or name, with feed URL, genres and artwork
iTunes lookup	itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=…&entity=podcastEpisode	JSON. One show, plus up to 200 episodes
Apple charts	rss.marketingtools.apple.com/api/v2/<cc>/podcasts/top/<n>/podcasts.json	JSON. Top Shows for a country, 25/50/100 deep
The show's RSS feed	Whatever address Apple (or you) gives — Megaphone, Simplecast, WordPress, anything	XML. The full catalogue: show notes, audio URLs, GUIDs, durations, episode numbers
Apple Podcasts page (opt-in)	The show's public web page	HTML with a schema.org block. The only place Apple publishes a star rating

Three things catch naive scrapers here, and all three are handled:

Apple answers with content-type: text/javascript. The body is JSON. A client that trusts the header sees a script and gives up.

Podcast feeds are large and irregular. A show with a long back catalogue is a multi-megabyte XML document — the largest one this was built against is 4.4 MB — and no two hosting platforms agree on how to write it. Durations arrive as 2138, 43:57 and 5:21:57. "Explicit" arrives as no, false and notExplicit. Show notes hide in <description>, <content:encoded> or <itunes:summary>, wrapped in CDATA, with entities encoded twice. One host writes length="0" for every enclosure. The parser here is a scanner built for exactly this shape — no XML library, no DOM — and it reads a 4.4 MB feed in about 20 ms.

Apple's copy of a feed address goes stale. When the feed does not answer, or answers with a web page instead of XML, the run falls back to Apple's episode list for that show and files a free feed-unavailable row saying why the notes are shorter than usual. You get the episodes either way.

Underneath: Apify proxy for Apple's endpoints, one pinned session per parallel worker. RSS feeds are fetched directly first — a feed is published for machines and lives on a CDN, and a multi-megabyte feed that takes a fraction of a second direct can take a minute or more through a shared exit — with the proxy as the fallback for the odd host that refuses Apify's own address. When an endpoint refuses an exit IP — HTTP 429, HTTP 403, an empty body, HTML where XML belongs — that session is retired and the same request goes out once more from a different address. Retrying on an address that was just refused only deepens the block, so it is never done. If the second address is refused too, the job stops, keeps every row it already delivered, and files one free blocked row saying where it stopped. Requests within one job are spaced 250–600 ms apart.

How it compares

• Episodes come from the feed, not from Apple. Apple's lookup stops at 200 episodes and hands you a flattened description with no episode number, no season, no per-episode artwork and no explicit flag. The feed has all of it and no ceiling. This Actor reads the feed by default and uses Apple as the fallback, which is the opposite of most tools that touch this data.
• Four sources, one schema. A search hit, a charting show, a feed you pasted and an Apple link all produce the same columns, so mixing them is a filter rather than a reconciliation project.
• Failures are free and legible. A dead feed, a show Apple has never heard of, an empty search or a block produce a diagnostic row with an errorType you can branch on — and no charge. A run that returns nothing at all finishes FAILED with the reason in its status message, never a green run containing an apology.
• A partial run is kept, not thrown away. Hit maxRunSecs or your charge ceiling halfway through a chart and you keep the ranks already written.
• Honest about what is not here. No transcripts, no download or listener numbers, no Spotify — see Limits below, in detail, rather than as a footnote.
• No login, ever. No Apple ID, no host account, no cookie jar, no session token. Public endpoints only, which is also why it runs under Apify's limited permissions.

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	What it does
podcasts	array of strings	prefilled with one	Apple Podcasts links, bare Apple IDs, RSS feed URLs, or show names. Prefix with feed:, id: or name: to be explicit. Duplicates are read, and billed, once
maxEpisodesPerPodcast	integer	50	Episodes per show, newest first. 0 = every episode in the feed. The feed is one request whatever you ask for
episodeSource	rss | apple	rss	The show's own feed (everything, no cap) or Apple's lookup (fewer fields, capped at 200, works without a feed). RSS falls back to Apple automatically
includeDescriptionHtml	boolean	false	Add descriptionHtml — the show notes with their links and markup intact
includeRating	boolean	false	Add rating and ratingCount. One extra ~600 KB page request per show, which is why it is off
searchQueries	array of strings	[]	Keyword search. One podcast row per hit, no episodes unless you ask
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	25	Hits per query. Apple's ceiling is 200
genreId	string	—	Restrict searches to one Apple genre — 1462 History, 1488 True Crime, 1489 News, 1533 Science, 1318 Technology
includeEpisodesForSearchHits	boolean	false	Also read every search hit's feed. One request per hit plus a feed download each
charts	array of strings	[]	Two-letter country codes → Apple's Top Shows chart as ranked rows
chartSize	25 | 50 | 100	50	How deep the chart goes. Apple serves exactly these three
includeChartDetails	boolean	false	Look each charting show up for its feed URL and episode count. One extra request per show
country	string	us	Apple storefront. Catalogue, search ranking and charts are all per-country; RSS feeds are global
maxConcurrency	integer	3	Shows, queries or charts in parallel. Each worker keeps its own proxy session
maxRunSecs	integer	240	Whole-run wall-clock budget. When it runs out the Actor keeps what it has and files a free diagnostic row for each entry it never reached
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify datacenter	Apple and the big podcast hosts answer datacenter addresses happily, so the cheap proxy is the default

Output reference

Column	On which rows	What it is
ok, rowType	all	true plus podcast / episode / chart, or false plus diagnostic
input	all	The entry this row came from, as you supplied it
appleId	all	Apple's collection ID — the join key between a show and its episodes
podcastTitle	all	The show's name, so a mixed sheet reads without a join
title	all	The show's name, or the episode's title
feedUrl, url, websiteUrl	podcast, episode	The RSS feed, the Apple page, the publisher's own site
author, ownerEmail	podcast, chart	Publisher name; the contact address from the feed's itunes:owner
description, descriptionHtml	podcast, episode	Show notes as text (clipped to 5,000 chars), and with markup when asked
language, categories, genres, keywords, explicit, copyright, podcastType	podcast	The feed's declarations, plus Apple's genre list
episodeCount, latestEpisodeAt, firstEpisodeAt	podcast	Catalogue size and date range — the whole feed, not just the rows returned
rating, ratingCount	podcast	Stars and how many, when includeRating is on
artworkUrl	all	Show art, or the episode's own where a feed sets one
episodeId, appleEpisodeId	episode	The feed's GUID (dedupe on this) and Apple's numeric track ID
publishedAt, durationSec, episodeNumber, seasonNumber, episodeType	episode	When, how long, and where it sits in the run of the show
audioUrl, audioType, audioSizeBytes	episode	The enclosure: the audio file itself, its MIME type and declared size
link, transcriptUrl	episode	The episode's web page; a declared transcript's address
rank	chart	Position in the country's Top Shows chart, 1 being the top
position	episode	1-based order within the show, newest first
resolvedFrom, source, sourceUrl	all	How the show was identified, which surface the row came from, and the exact address
error, errorType	diagnostic	What went wrong, and a type to branch on
country, scrapedAt	all	Storefront, and when the row was written

errorType is one of not-found, no-results, feed-unavailable, invalid-input, blocked, timeout.

Pricing

$0.40 per 1,000 episodes. Pay-per-event, with proxy already inside that number — there is no separate proxy line on your bill for this Actor.

Event	What triggers it	FREE	Starter	Scale	Business
Episode returned (primary)	One episode row written to your dataset	$0.0004	$0.0004	$0.00032	$0.00024
Podcast record returned	One podcast row — the show, merged from Apple and its feed	$0.0015	$0.0015	$0.0015	$0.0015
Chart entry returned	One position in a country's Top Shows chart	$0.0005	$0.0005	$0.0005	$0.0005
Run started	Once per run, after the first paid row	$0.001	$0.001	$0.001	$0.001

Worked example. 20 shows, 50 newest episodes each, one show's feed dead (its episodes come from Apple instead), one name misspelled beyond rescue:

• 19 shows × 50 episodes + 50 from Apple's fallback = 1,000 episodes × $0.0004 = $0.40
• 20 podcast rows × $0.0015 = $0.03
• 1 run start = $0.001
• 1 unresolvable name, 1 dead feed = $0.00 (free diagnostic rows)
• Total: $0.431

Chart tracking example. Four countries, Top 50, no enrichment: 200 chart rows × $0.0005 + $0.001 = $0.101 per run, about $3.03 a month daily.

Back-catalogue example. One show with 440 episodes, maxEpisodesPerPodcast: 0: 440 × $0.0004 + $0.0015 + $0.001 = $0.1785, from two requests.

What you are never charged for: a show that does not exist, a feed that will not answer, an entry that was not a podcast, a search that matched nothing, a show the run never reached before maxRunSecs, or a request the endpoint blocked. If a whole run comes back empty it finishes FAILED and bills nothing at all, start fee included.

Set ACTOR_MAX_TOTAL_CHARGE_USD on a run and the Actor stops fetching once the ceiling is in sight, rather than handing you rows it cannot bill or billing you for rows it cannot hand over. It finishes SUCCEEDED with the ceiling named in its status message, and everything already delivered is yours.

Limits, and the ones that might bite

No transcripts. This Actor returns transcriptUrl when a publisher declares one in their feed, and nothing more — it does not download or generate transcripts. Most feeds declare none. If the show is also published on YouTube, our YouTube Transcript API will give you the spoken words from there.

Apple's lookup caps at 200 episodes, so episodeSource: "apple" cannot return more than that however large the show. The RSS feed has no such cap and is the default for exactly this reason. What a feed contains is the publisher's choice: most carry the whole catalogue, some trim to the last hundred or so, and nothing outside a feed can be recovered from it.

Apple ratings are per-show and opt-in. rating and ratingCount come from the show's Apple Podcasts page, not from any API, and cost one extra request each — so they are null unless you set includeRating: true. There are no individual podcast reviews here at all: Apple does not publish them in a machine-readable form.

No listener or download numbers. Nobody publishes them. Download counts live in the publisher's own hosting dashboard, and any tool that claims to have them for arbitrary shows is estimating.

Apple only — no Spotify, YouTube or Amazon catalogue. The episodes are from the publisher's feed, which is the same feed every app reads, so the episode data is platform-neutral. The catalogue, the charts and the search ranking are Apple's.

Feeds disagree with each other, and the nulls are honest. Of the four real feeds this was built against: one sends length="0" for every enclosure, so audioSizeBytes is null there; one carries no per-episode artwork; one declares no itunes:type; none of them numbers its seasons; and only some episodes of most shows carry an itunes:episode number — trailers and bonus material usually do not. A null means the publisher did not say.

Episode order is feed order. Every real podcast feed serves newest first — that is what podcast apps expect — and position reflects the order the feed was in. A publisher who reorders their feed will reorder your rows.

Charts are Top Shows only, at 25, 50 or 100, per country. Apple's chart feed has no per-genre chart and no historical data: each run captures the chart as it stands.

resolvedFrom: "search" means a guess was made. A show name is resolved to Apple's first hit. For a distinctive name that is right; for "The Daily" there are several, and pasting the Apple link removes the ambiguity. The column is there so you can spot it.

The upstream format may change. Apple's endpoints and the podcast hosting platforms change their output without notice — that is true of every tool that reads this data, including the ones that do not say so. When a shape changes, rows stop arriving and you get free blocked or feed-unavailable diagnostic rows rather than quietly wrong data, and a run that returns nothing bills nothing.

Rate and reliability. Requests go out through proxy sessions pinned per worker, one rotation per block, and a 250–600 ms pause between requests of the same job. Three jobs in parallel is the default because feeds are large; raising maxConcurrency speeds a long list up and raises memory use with it.

Use it from an AI agent, or from code

One JSON object in, one flat array out — the shape agent runtimes want. The Actor runs with limited permissions, uses pay-per-event pricing and never enters Standby, so it works over the Apify MCP server and with x402 agentic payments. The Integrations tab pushes results to Slack, a webhook, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, Snowflake or BigQuery.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/insight.solutions~podcast-api/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"podcasts":["https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110"],"maxEpisodesPerPodcast":50}'

# pip install apify-client
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("insight.solutions/podcast-api").call(run_input={
    "podcasts": ["Huberman Lab", "https://feeds.simplecast.com/Sl5CSM3S"],
    "maxEpisodesPerPodcast": 50,
    "episodeSource": "rss",
})

for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if row["rowType"] == "episode":
        print(row["publishedAt"], row["durationSec"], row["title"])

FAQ

Do I need an account with Apple or with a podcast host? No. Every source here is public: Apple's search, lookup and chart endpoints, and the RSS feed that any podcast app reads.

How do I deduplicate between runs? On episodeId, which is the feed's own GUID and the same identifier podcast apps use. An incremental pipeline is an upsert keyed on (appleId, episodeId). Apple's episode records carry the same GUID, so rows from the two sources join cleanly.

Can I get every episode of a show? Yes — maxEpisodesPerPodcast: 0 returns every item in the feed, which for most shows is the whole catalogue. It is still one request.

Why is audioSizeBytes null? Because that feed sends length="0" in its enclosure tag, which several large hosts do. Zero is not a file size; null is the honest reading.

Why did I get fewer episodes than I asked for? The feed had fewer, or you used episodeSource: "apple", which Apple caps at 200. The episodeCount column tells you how many the show actually has.

What does source: "both" mean? That the podcast row was merged: Apple supplied the ID, the store URL and the genre list, and the feed supplied the title, description, categories, artwork, owner email and date range. Where both had a value, the feed wins for anything the publisher controls.

Can I search inside episode titles or show notes? Not at the source — Apple's search matches shows, not episodes. Fetch the show's episodes and filter locally; one feed request gives you every episode to search through.

Does country change the episodes? No. RSS feeds are global; the episodes are identical wherever you read them from. country changes Apple's catalogue, search ranking and charts.

What happens if one show fails? The others still run. The failed one produces a free diagnostic row and the run finishes SUCCEEDED. If every entry fails, the run finishes FAILED and you are billed nothing at all.

Is the data fresh? Live. Every run reads Apple and the feeds at that moment; nothing is cached.

Legal and data-protection notes

• Public feeds and public endpoints only. An RSS feed is published precisely so that software will read it; Apple's search, lookup and chart endpoints are the ones its own web player uses. The Actor never logs in, never accepts cookies or session tokens, and never takes an API key belonging to anyone else.
• ownerEmail is a published business contact. It is the address the publisher put in their own feed so that directories can verify ownership. In most jurisdictions a business contact address is still personal data when it identifies a person: have a lawful basis before you use it for outreach, honour opt-outs, and check the marketing rules where you and the recipient are.
• Episode content belongs to its publisher. Titles, show notes and audio are copyrighted works, and copyright on the podcast row is often where the publisher states their terms. Indexing, analysis and linking are the ordinary uses and are what this is built for; republishing is your call and your responsibility.
• Audio URLs are not a licence. audioUrl is the address a podcast app would fetch. Downloading it at scale is a cost to the publisher's host and may breach their terms; this Actor never downloads audio.
• Not affiliated with Apple Inc. or with any podcast, publisher or hosting platform whose content you retrieve. All names and trademarks belong to their owners and are used only to describe which public endpoints this Actor reads.

Our other Actors

Every Insight Solutions Actor is pay-per-result with no browser, no login and no API key, and every one of them returns free diagnostic rows instead of billing for failures. Prices are per 1,000 results.

Video, audio & social

• YouTube Transcript API — captions as timed segments, text, SRT or VTT, with language fallback and translation.
• YouTube Comments API — comments and replies with likes, pinned and hearted flags, newest or top sort.
• YouTube Channel API — a channel's videos, Shorts and live streams, plus YouTube search.
• Bluesky Scraper — profiles, posts, followers and follows from the public AT Protocol API.
• Telegram Channel Scraper — posts, views and channel stats from public Telegram channels.
• Substack Scraper — posts with full free text, comments and publication profiles.

News, documents & the web

• Google News Search, Topics & Real Article URLs — news search and topic feeds with the publisher's real URL decoded.
• Website to Markdown — Content Extractor for LLMs & RAG — any site as clean Markdown, text and heading-aware chunks.
• Internet Archive API — archive.org search, item metadata, files and reviews.
• Wayback Machine Toolkit — archived URL inventories, snapshots and text diffs between dates.
• Website Technology Detector — the tech stack behind any site, with the evidence for each detection.
• Domain Intelligence API — DNS, RDAP registration, TLS certificate and HTTP facts in one row per domain.
• SEO Page Audit — sitemap crawl with on-page checks, structured data and broken-link reports.
• Keyword Suggestions API — Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon and eBay autocomplete with alphabet and question expansions.
• Website Contact Extractor — emails, phone numbers and social profiles from any list of websites.

Business, finance & jobs

• Congress & Insider Trades API — STOCK Act periodic transaction reports and SEC Form 4 insider trades in one schema.
• SEC EDGAR API — filings, XBRL financials and full-text search by ticker or CIK.
• Y Combinator Companies, Batches & Founders — the YC directory with founders and social links, filterable by batch, industry and hiring status.
• Career Site Jobs API — jobs straight from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and 10+ other ATS career sites.
• New Job Postings Monitor — new, closed and changed postings on the career sites you watch.
• Shopify Products API — any Shopify store's catalogue, variants, prices and stock signals.

Apps & games

• App Store & Google Play Reviews API — reviews from both stores with ratings, versions and developer replies.
• App Store Top Charts & App Search API — Apple top charts by country and genre, plus app search and details.
• Steam Reviews API — Steam reviews with playtime, helpfulness and game details.
• Steam Game Data API — prices, tags, review scores, live player counts and top charts.