Podcast Search, Episodes & Contacts Scraper + AI

Find podcasts, pull every episode, grab feed contacts, and—optionally—turn the raw feed into AI insights: show summaries, topic tags, target audience, and guest/host names for booking & PR outreach. No API key, no quota, no Apple developer account.

Most podcast scrapers stop at "here's the show and its episodes." This one adds the layer that actually saves you hours: an AI enrichment pass that no other Apify podcast actor offers.

---

What it does

• 🔎 Discover podcasts by keyword search, by top-chart genre, or directly from Apple Podcasts URLs / RSS feeds / collection IDs.
• 🎙️ Full episode lists from each show's RSS feed: title, description, publish date, audio URL, duration, season/episode numbers, artwork.
• 📇 Feed contacts: owner name, email and website pulled straight from the feed.
• 🤖 Optional AI insights (billed only when you enable them):
  • Show insights — a clean summary, topic tags and a target-audience description.
  • Guest/host extraction — real person names mined from recent episodes, perfect for building podcast-booking outreach lists.
  • Episode summaries — a one-line summary and topic tags for recent episodes.

Built for reliability: handles paged/truncated RSS feeds, retries on Apple's rate limits (HTTP 429), and degrades gracefully when a show has no public feed.

---

Who it's for

• PR & podcast-booking agencies — find shows in a niche, get the host/guest names and the feed contact, and pitch your clients.
• Advertisers & sponsorship researchers — surface active shows by genre, see cadence and audience.
• Transcription / AI tool builders — export clean audio URLs + GUIDs to feed a transcription pipeline.
• Researchers & analysts — build topic-tagged datasets of shows and episodes.

---

Input

Field	Description
Search terms	Keywords to find shows on Apple Podcasts.
Podcast URLs / RSS feeds / IDs	Apple show URLs, direct RSS feed URLs, or bare Apple collection IDs.
Discover from top charts (genre)	Pull the current top podcasts for a genre (Business, Comedy, True Crime, …).
Country / storefront	Apple storefront for search & charts (e.g. us, gb, de, tr).
Max podcasts (total)	Hard cap across all sources.
Max podcasts per source	Cap per search term / chart.
Scrape episodes + Max episodes per podcast	Fetch the episode list (newest first), up to 300.
Include feed contact	Owner name / email / website from the feed.
Enable AI insights	Master switch, then pick: show insights, guest/host extraction, episode summaries.
AI output language	Language for AI text.
Proxy configuration	Datacenter proxy is enough (and cheap).

Example input

{
  "searchTerms": ["startup", "venture capital"],
  "chartGenre": "1321",
  "country": "us",
  "maxPodcasts": 25,
  "includeEpisodes": true,
  "maxEpisodesPerPodcast": 50,
  "includeOwnerContact": true,
  "aiEnrichment": true,
  "aiShowInsights": true,
  "aiGuestExtraction": true
}

---

Output

Each record is one podcast with its episodes, contacts and (optional) AI fields:

{
  "recordType": "podcast",
  "collectionId": 1504208000,
  "podcastName": "The Example Startup Show",
  "artistName": "Jane Founder",
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.example.com/show.xml",
  "appleUrl": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1504208000",
  "primaryGenre": "Business",
  "trackCount": 212,
  "ownerName": "Jane Founder",
  "ownerEmail": "hello@example.com",
  "episodesFetched": 50,
  "episodes": [
    {
      "title": "Scaling from 0 to 1",
      "pubDate": "Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 -0000",
      "durationSeconds": 2789,
      "audioUrl": "https://cdn.example.com/ep212.mp3",
      "guid": "ep-212"
    }
  ],
  "aiShowSummary": "A weekly show where founders break down...",
  "aiTopics": ["fundraising", "product-market fit", "hiring"],
  "aiTargetAudience": "Early-stage founders and operators...",
  "aiGuests": [
    { "episodeTitle": "Scaling from 0 to 1", "names": ["Alex Investor"], "role": "guest" }
  ]
}

---

How it works (and why it's reliable)

• Uses Apple's public iTunes JSON endpoints for search, lookup (batched) and charts — no key, no quota.
• Reads each show's public RSS feed for the episode list and contacts, following paged feeds so you get the back catalogue, not just the latest page.
• Datacenter proxy is enough — costs stay low, so the price stays fair.

Notes

• The feed contact is the address published in the RSS feed (itunes:owner). It's often the real host, but sometimes a hosting/admin catch-all — treat accordingly.
• AI features are off by default and billed per insight, so a plain scrape stays cheap.
• This actor scrapes publicly available podcast metadata. Respect each show's terms and applicable laws when using the data.