Podcast RSS Episode Extractor

Extract clean podcast episode data from public RSS and Atom feeds. This Apify Actor turns one or more podcast feed URLs into a structured dataset with episode titles, URLs, audio links, publish dates, durations, descriptions, GUIDs, and source feed information.

What does this Actor do?

Podcast RSS Episode Extractor helps researchers, content marketers, podcast agencies, newsletter writers, media monitors, and no-code operators collect podcast episode metadata without building their own feed parser.

You provide public podcast RSS or Atom feed URLs. The Actor fetches each feed, parses the XML, normalizes common podcast fields, deduplicates episodes, and saves the results to an Apify Dataset.

It uses only public feed URLs that you provide. It does not log in to platforms, bypass CAPTCHA, scrape private content, or generate fake output.

Typical use cases

• Build a podcast episode database from public feeds
• Monitor competitor podcast publishing activity
• Collect episode URLs and audio URLs for content research
• Export podcast metadata to CSV, JSON, Google Sheets, or Make/Zapier workflows
• Create datasets for AI summarization pipelines using public episode metadata

Input

Podcast feed URLs

Add one or more public http:// or https:// RSS/Atom feed URLs. Local, private-network, malformed, FTP, and non-HTTP URLs are rejected.

Maximum total episodes

maxResults limits how many unique episode items are saved across all feeds.

Maximum episodes per feed

maxEpisodesPerFeed controls how many episodes are parsed from each feed before the global limit is applied.

Include descriptions

Turn includeDescriptions off if you want smaller datasets and only need episode-level metadata.

Example input

{
  "feedUrls": [
    { "url": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl" },
    { "url": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml" }
  ],
  "maxResults": 20,
  "maxEpisodesPerFeed": 10,
  "maxFeeds": 2,
  "includeDescriptions": true,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 30
}

Output

Each podcast episode is saved as one item in the Apify Dataset.

Field	Meaning
feedUrl	Source RSS/Atom feed URL
podcastTitle	Podcast/show title from the feed
episodeTitle	Episode title
episodeUrl	Public episode page URL when provided
audioUrl	Direct audio enclosure URL when provided
publishedAt	ISO publish timestamp when parseable
duration	Original podcast duration value
durationSeconds	Duration normalized to seconds when possible
description	Cleaned episode description, if enabled
guid	Feed episode GUID
error	Error message for failed feed-level output rows
extractedAt	ISO timestamp of extraction

Example output

{
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl",
  "podcastTitle": "Example Podcast",
  "episodeTitle": "How to research a niche",
  "episodeUrl": "https://example.com/episodes/research",
  "audioUrl": "https://cdn.example.com/audio.mp3",
  "publishedAt": "2026-01-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "duration": "42:10",
  "durationSeconds": 2530,
  "description": "A cleaned episode description.",
  "guid": "episode-guid",
  "error": null,
  "extractedAt": "2026-07-04T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Limitations

• The Actor supports public RSS and Atom feeds only.
• It does not download audio files.
• It does not transcribe or summarize episodes.
• Some feeds omit fields like audio URL, duration, or episode page URL.
• Very unusual XML structures may not map every field perfectly.
• Private feeds, login-only feeds, and blocked URLs are not supported.

Suggested Pay Per Event pricing

Recommended primary event: one extracted episode / default dataset item.

Suggested launch price: $0.30 per 1,000 extracted episodes plus Apify platform usage costs. This keeps the Actor inexpensive for researchers while monetizing recurring feed monitoring and bulk exports.

SEO title suggestion

Podcast RSS Episode Extractor - Podcast Feed to JSON API

SEO description suggestion

Extract podcast episodes from public RSS and Atom feeds. Get episode titles, URLs, audio links, publish dates, durations, descriptions, and GUIDs as clean JSON or CSV.

Support and maintenance

If a feed fails, check the error field first. Common causes are invalid URLs, private feeds, malformed XML, timeouts, or feeds that return HTML instead of RSS/Atom XML.