how it works · sources
Podcasts are open. That is why any episode is possible.
Unlike video platforms, podcasting was built on a public standard. Every show publishes an RSS feed, every episode in it points at an audio file anyone can fetch, and no app owns the catalogue. Podmenti simply uses the standard as intended.
One directory of everything
To find a show we ask the Podcast Index, an open, non-profit directory of the entire medium. It tracks around 4.7 million podcasts and 148 million episodes, with roughly 350,000 shows publishing in any given month. Searching on Podmenti searches that directory live, which is why the answer to "do you have this podcast?" is almost always yes, even for a show nobody has requested before.
Live totals are on podcastindex.org; these figures were read on 2026-09-01.
Audio straight from the host
We never re-upload or mirror anything. When you request an episode, our transcriber downloads the audio from the same URL a podcast app would use: the show's own host. The creator's download is counted, their ads are served, their numbers are their numbers.
Across the 100 shows we index continuously, the hosts break down like this:
- Megaphone by Spotify 30% Vox Media, ESPN, Slate, iHeart and most of the biggest independent shows
- Simplecast 10% Sirius XM
- Art19 9% Wondery, Amazon
- Transistor 4% independent and business shows
- Omny Studio 3% Triton, radio networks
Megaphone, Spotify's enterprise hosting platform, serves nearly a third of them on its own: it is where the largest networks and the most-downloaded independent shows live. The rest are spread across a long tail of hosts, all speaking the same standard, which is the whole point. Nothing here depends on a deal with anyone.
What "open" does not mean
Open does not mean unchanging. The file a host serves today is assembled with today's ads, and can differ from the file we transcribed. We treat that as our problem, not yours: how we keep timestamps in sync.
Open also does not mean free of rights. Transcripts on Podmenti are for reading, searching, research and accessibility. The audio and the words belong to the people who made them, and we link back to the original file on every transcript page.
Shows we cannot do
A small number of shows are exclusive to one app and publish no public feed, or publish a feed whose audio is behind a subscription. If a show does not appear in search, that is almost always why. Everything else, from a network flagship to a podcast with twelve listeners, is fair game.