Apple Podcasts Scraper – Search, Shows, Episodes & Reviews

Search Apple Podcasts and get clean JSON: show metadata, episode lists and star-rating reviews, with no login, no API key and no headless browser. Built for podcast marketers, guest-booking agencies, researchers and AI agents that need Apple's podcast catalog without scraping HTML. Reads Apple's own public search, lookup and RSS endpoints with retries and a silent-failure check, so a scheduled run keeps working when Apple hiccups.

What you get

• Every podcast as one row – name, publisher, feed URL, artwork, genres, total episode count, latest release date and the public Apple Podcasts URL.
• Episodes on request – title, publish date, duration, direct audio URL and description for the most recent episodes of each show, pulled from Apple's own index and topped up from the show's RSS feed when Apple returns fewer than you asked for.
• Reviews on request – rating, title and text for recent customer reviews. Reviewer nicknames are dropped; only the rating and text are kept.
• Three ways in – search terms, explicit Apple podcast IDs, or raw RSS feed URLs for shows that never made it into Apple's catalog.

Sample rows

A podcast row and an episode row from a default search for "artificial intelligence":

{
  "type": "podcast",
  "podcast_id": "1533115958",
  "name": "Me, Myself, and AI",
  "publisher": "MIT Sloan Management Review",
  "feed_url": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/mesmyselfai",
  "artwork_url": "https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/.../600x600bb.jpg",
  "genres": ["Technology", "Business", "Podcasts"],
  "episode_count": 142,
  "latest_release": "2026-09-03T09:00:00+00:00",
  "apple_url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/me-myself-and-ai/id1533115958",
  "country": "USA",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-09T18:00:00+00:00"
}

{
  "type": "episode",
  "podcast_id": "1533115958",
  "podcast_name": "Me, Myself, and AI",
  "episode_id": "1000123456789",
  "title": "How one bank rebuilt fraud detection around AI agents",
  "published_at": "2026-09-03T09:00:00+00:00",
  "duration_seconds": 1854,
  "audio_url": "https://traffic.megaphone.fm/....mp3",
  "description": "Two guests explain what changed when their fraud team...",
  "apple_url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/.../id1533115958?i=1000123456789"
}

Input

Input	Default	What it does
searchTerms	["artificial intelligence"]	Podcast search terms, e.g. ["true crime", "startup"].
podcastIds	[]	Apple Podcasts numeric IDs to scrape directly, combined with search results.
feedUrls	[]	RSS feed URLs for shows without an Apple catalog entry. Always processed, even past maxPodcasts.
country	us	Apple storefront country code.
maxPodcasts	50	Cap on podcasts from search terms and podcast IDs combined.
maxEpisodesPerPodcast	20	Episodes kept per podcast, most recent first.
includeEpisodes	true	Fetch episode lists.
includeReviews	false	Fetch reviews (needs an Apple ID; has no effect on feed-only podcasts).
maxReviewsPerPodcast	50	Reviews kept per podcast when reviews are on.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription: $2 per 1,000 podcasts, $0.50 per 1,000 episodes, $0.50 per 1,000 reviews. A default run (up to 50 podcasts, 20 episodes each, no reviews) costs at most $0.10 for podcasts plus $0.50 for episodes. Set a maximum charge on the run and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached, charging only for rows actually saved.

Use it from your tools

• API and SDKs – call it via the Apify API or the official Python/JavaScript clients: one call to start the run, one to fetch the dataset as JSON or CSV.
• Schedules – run it daily inside Apify and push new episodes or reviews to Google Sheets, a webhook or your own storage automatically.
• n8n, Make and Zapier – trigger runs and pipe podcast data into a workflow through Apify's integration for each.
• AI agents and MCP – this Actor is eligible for agentic use via Apify's MCP server and supports pay-per-event pricing, so an agent can call it mid-task and pay only per podcast, episode or review it actually reads.
• Webhooks – fire on run finished to kick off the next step in a pipeline as soon as fresh episodes land.

Details

• Sources: Apple's public itunes.apple.com/search, /lookup and customer-reviews endpoints, plus each show's own RSS feed. No authentication, no proxies, no browser, no personal data (reviewer nicknames are dropped).
• Rate limits: Apple limits search/lookup to roughly 20 requests/minute per IP; the Actor paces itself accordingly and retries 403/429 with backoff.
• Reliability: 429/403 (rate limit) and 5xx responses retry with exponential backoff (5 tries); a 200 without the expected data counts as a failure. One bad search term or ID never stops the run — it becomes an error row and the rest continues.
• Run stats: the STATS record in the run's key-value store holds request and error counts per category (network, rate_limit, blocked, not_found, other).
• Output: one dataset row per podcast, episode and review, distinguished by the type column. The Overview table shows type, podcast, title, publish date and Apple URL. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, fetch through the Apify API, or schedule runs into Google Sheets, Make, Zapier or your own code.