Pod Researcher

Find ACTIVE podcasts whose recent episodes cover a topic, each with the best published contact route for booking a guest or buying sponsorship. Searches episode titles and show notes across ~740k podcasts that published in the last year (from the Podcast Index open directory plus each show's own RSS feed and website). Every result carries the episodes that prove the fit, the show's activity status, and either best_route (with holder_type person / role / hosting_account_owner, its source_url and last_observed date) or route_status "none_found" with what was checked. Routes designated for your purpose rank first; a general contact or a person's published address is a labelled fallback. For a signed-in account, shows and people you recorded as contacted, declined, booked or do_not_contact are left out. Use get_podcast_profile for one show in full.

One podcast in full: identity (title, feed URL, website, podcast:guid, Apple id), activity status and feed health, the latest episodes, and EVERY published contact route with holder_type (person / role / hosting_account_owner), purpose, source_url and last_observed. Accepts a show_id, an RSS feed URL (old URLs of moved feeds resolve) or a podcast:guid. For a signed-in account, also returns your outreach history with the show.

Signed-in accounts: for your topic watches (or one, by watch_id), the podcasts that match now and did not at the last check, with their best contact route. Each call moves the baseline forward, so a show is reported once.

Which episodes of a podcast have a publisher-provided transcript, and where: reads the show's own RSS feed live and lists every episode's Podcasting 2.0 <podcast:transcript> links with their format (SRT, WebVTT, JSON, text, HTML), language and URL. Episodes without one are kept in the list and labelled transcript_status "no_publisher_transcript", and a show that publishes none says so plainly with its episode list intact. Pass a show_id or podcast:guid from find_podcast_contacts, or the RSS feed URL directly. Use search_podcast_transcript to pull timestamped passages from one.

Signed-in accounts: record what happened when you reached out to a podcast, so find_podcast_contacts stops suggesting it. outcome: contacted, replied, declined, booked, bounced, do_not_contact or clear (clear lifts an earlier do_not_contact). Name the show by show_id. For a PERSON-level record (e.g. the host asked never to be contacted about any of their shows), pass scope 'person' and the contact_id of their email route from get_podcast_profile: every show that publishes that address is then left out of your searches. Never pass an email address: a call carrying one is refused and nothing is recorded. History is private to your account.

Ask for one podcast's RSS feed to be read again now rather than at its next scheduled check. Returns the show's current state and when the refresh was queued; new episodes show up in get_podcast_profile once the feed has been read (normally within minutes). Contact routes are re-checked separately, not by this call.

What a podcast episode actually said about a topic, with timestamps: fetches the episode's publisher-provided transcript (Podcasting 2.0 <podcast:transcript>, as SRT, WebVTT, JSON, plain text or HTML) and returns the passages that match a query, each with start and end time, the speakers when the file names them, and the matched words. Defaults to the newest episode that has a transcript; name one by guid, URL, episode number or title words. A plain-text transcript without timing is returned as text passages with a note. An episode with no publisher transcript is reported as such with the episodes that do have one.

Signed-in accounts: save a topic x purpose search so get_podcast_topic_changes can report podcasts that newly match it. Records the current matches as the baseline, so get_podcast_topic_changes returns only shows that appear after now. Returns the watch_id.