Podcast Review Scraper
Pricing
Pay per usage
Podcast Review Scraper
Podcast Review Scraper. Extract structured data with automatic pagination, proxy rotation, and JSON/CSV export. Pay only for results.
What does this actor do?
The Podcast Review Scraper is an Apify actor that extracts reviews and ratings from Apple Podcasts for any podcast. Given an Apple Podcasts URL, it collects reviewer names, star ratings, review text, review dates, and the country of origin for each review. The actor uses Apple's iTunes RSS customer review feeds as its primary data source, with web scraping as a fallback, to deliver comprehensive review data in a structured format.
Why use this actor?
Understanding audience sentiment is critical for podcast creators, advertisers, and media buyers. Apple Podcasts is the largest podcast platform by listener share, and its reviews offer valuable insights into what listeners love and dislike about a show. This actor automates the collection of review data, enabling podcast hosts to monitor feedback at scale, advertisers to evaluate show quality before sponsoring, media companies to benchmark competitor podcasts, and researchers to analyze trends in podcast audience sentiment.
How does it work?
The actor first extracts the podcast ID and country code from the provided Apple Podcasts URL. It then uses Apple's iTunes Lookup API to retrieve podcast metadata (name, genre, etc.) and the iTunes RSS customer review feed to fetch actual reviews. The RSS feed returns reviews sorted by most recent, and the actor pages through multiple feed pages to collect up to your specified maximum. If the RSS approach fails, the actor falls back to CheerioCrawler to scrape the Apple Podcasts web page directly, parsing reviews from HTML elements and JSON-LD structured data.
Input parameters
- podcastUrl (string): Apple Podcasts URL for the podcast. Default:
"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-joe-rogan-experience/id360084272". - maxResults (integer): Maximum number of reviews to return. Default:
50.
Output fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| podcastName | Name of the podcast |
| reviewerName | Username of the reviewer |
| rating | Star rating (1-5) |
| reviewText | Full text of the review including title |
| reviewDate | Date the review was posted |
| country | Country code of the reviewer |
Cost and performance
The actor runs with a default memory allocation of 1024 MB. Using the iTunes RSS feed approach, runs typically complete in under 30 seconds. The web scraping fallback takes 1-2 minutes. At the Mid PPE tier, each result costs approximately $0.00075. Collecting 50 reviews is the default and usually costs less than a penny total.
Tips and best practices
- You can scrape reviews for podcasts in any country by changing the country code in the Apple Podcasts URL (e.g., /gb/ for United Kingdom, /au/ for Australia, /de/ for Germany).
- Run the actor regularly to monitor new reviews and track sentiment trends over time.
- Use the Podcast Guest Finder alongside this actor to discover podcasts and then analyze their review quality.
- Export reviews to a spreadsheet for sentiment analysis or use a text analytics tool to identify common themes in positive and negative reviews.
- The rating distribution (count of 5-star vs 1-star reviews) is a strong indicator of overall listener satisfaction.
- Compare reviews across multiple competing podcasts to understand what differentiates successful shows in your niche.
- For podcast advertisers, high ratings combined with positive review sentiment indicate an engaged, satisfied audience that is more likely to respond to ads.
