Listen Notes For Podcasters

If you are a podcaster, this page is to answer questions you may have about Listen Notes.

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1. Why should I put my podcasts on Listen Notes? 🔗

Listing your podcast on Listen Notes is beneficial - the same logical reasoning that listing podcasts on iTunes or other podcast directories helps provide visibility. It can help you gain listeners and give them one more avenue to find you.

The Listen Notes website draws ~4,600,000 pageviews/month. More and more people use Listen Notes to search podcasts by topics, where they may discover your podcast. This is similar to how people discover websites on Google, movies on IMDb, books on Goodreads...

A greater amount of podcast apps and services use our API to access our comprehensive podcast database. Any podcasts listed on Listen Notes are immediately available via the apps and services that use our API. In other words, if your podcasts are not listed on Listen Notes, then your podcasts will not be accessible on a growing number of podcast apps and services.

To be clear, we don't (and we can't) host audio files on our end. When listeners play audio on Listen Notes (or apps using our API), they hit the audio url directly from your RSS feed. Therefore, you can see stats on your hosting services.

2. I don't see my podcast on Listen Notes / I want you to delete my podcast from your site... 🔗

If you don't see your podcast on Listen Notes, and would like it listed, please submit your podcast here.

If you don't want your podcast to be listed on Listen Notes, here is how you can delete it from Listen Notes -- Please note that if a podcast is deleted from our podcast directory, it will also disappear from all apps that use our API -- You may lose many listeners who use those apps.

3. How can my podcast rank No. 1 in search results for keyword "XYZ", "shopping", "insurance", "sports", "business", "dog", or other generic keywords? 🔗

tl;dr version: Keep up the good work of 1) producing awesome content, 2) writing informative show notes, and 3) getting more listeners.

For Listen Notes, we index a podcast’s metadata (title, publisher, show notes...) and some audio transcripts.

Ranking is a complex topic. For any good search engine in general, ranking of search results is done in an automatic & objective way. As described in Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines - a very good resource to learn SEO, by the way - your content needs to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Ranking changes dynamically on Listen Notes, as we get new signals over time, e.g., # of clicks / plays on the website, # of clips / listen later, # of estimate downloads from various external sources, recommendations on blogs/online media... Just like other search engines, we can't reveal the exact ranking algorithm, since we don't want people to game the system and force a podcast to the top spot.

4. I search my podcast name, but I don't see my episodes in the search results / the episodes are out of order / only a few episodes show up. 🔗

Your podcast name may be very generic (e.g., "You are welcome" or "I like that") and is therefore tough to rank highly in the search results. This may be a general SEO issue across different search engines. Try searching for your podcast name on Google, and see what results you get.

By default, we sort search results by relevance. But you can choose to sort by published date.

Please note that most people don't search for your podcast name on Listen Notes. They may not know that your show exists. People often search for individual names, companies, or topics. That’s how they often find individual episodes from unknown podcasts in the search results. It’s the same logic as not Googling for "New York Times" but instead querying "Tyler Perry" and discovering an article about him (maybe from unknown blogs).

5. What's the user-agent of the Listen Notes crawler that hits my podcast's RSS feed? 🔗

The user-agent looks like this: ListenNotes/3.0 (id=e5c3f903ce344ad390208e5b4b1f79a8; +https://www.listennotes.com/about/)

We do not currently honor robots.txt files. As we don't follow links, it makes sense to not process robots.txt files as if we were a generic web crawler (e.g., Googlebot). If you would still like your RSS feed blocked from the Listen Notes crawler, please contact us to delete your podcast from our database.

6. How can I promote my show on Listen Notes for free? 🔗

Yes. There are a few ways to promote your show on Listen Notes for free:

You should claim your show on our website. Then, you can post classified ads if you are looking for sponsors, guests, or cross promotion opportunities. Learn more: How to post classified ads?
You can do a written interview with us. Once your written interview is done, we will tweet it on our official X (formerly Twitter) account (Example). Learn more: How to post a podcaster interview?
You can create a playlist of your top episodes and share with your listeners (e.g., starter episodes to get to know my show). If you have multiple podcasts, you can even create a playlist of episodes from different podcasts (e.g., episodes discussing the same topic, but from different shows) - your listeners can just subscribe to the RSS of this playlist, rather than multiple RSS feeds of different podcasts (Example). You can take a look at other people's playlist as well.
You can add transcripts to your Listen Notes pages (Example). It's always a great idea to use transcripts to increase the visibility of your shows on the Internet. Plain texts are more friendly to search engines (e.g., Google and Listen Notes) than audio files. Our podcast search engine, which is used by over 2,000,000 people every month, will automatically index transcripts added by you, so people can search keywords mentioned in the transcript and discover your episodes (Example). Please note that most people in the world don't know the existence of your show, so they won't search your podcast name; instead, they search a person's name or a topic and happen to come across your episodes. [Pro-Tip: Transcribe podcasts using Listen411.com, Lightning-fast, Cost-effective Podcast Transcription]
We also provide a free tool Listen Clips for you to create shareable videos / audios. For example, you can cut a 30-second segment from one of your episodes and export a video file to share on X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram. Learn more: How to create a podcast clip for free?
If you've claimed your podcast page on Listen Notes, please share your Listen Notes page and at-mention @ListenNotes on X (formerly Twitter). Our official X (formerly Twitter) account will retweet to promote your show to our followers.

7. How can I change my podcast info (e.g., RSS feed, title, description, email, website...) on Listen Notes? How can I delete some episodes? How can I change my podcast's image? 🔗

You can find answers on the Help page.

8. How often do you fetch my RSS feed(s)? 🔗

We check the RSS feed of all podcasts 24/7. For recently-listened podcasts (based on our website and API traffic), new episodes would be added to our database within 1 hour (typically within 15 to 30 minutes). For other podcasts, new episodes would be fetched within a few hours - typically 2 to 4 hours.

9. How can I add transcripts? 🔗

Two approaches:

1) Add transcripts manually. If you already have transcripts of your podcast episodes, you can add them to episode pages (Example). Go to the EDIT tab and add the transcript there (Example).

2) Add transcripts automatically. If your podcast hosting service supports <podcast:transcript> tag (or you know how to modify the rss feed), we'll automatically pull transcripts from the RSS feed. Note: we only support the html version for now (type="text/html"), not srt or json.

Learn more here.

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