Listen Notes
Episode-level podcast search engine with a REST API trusted by thousands of developers.
About
Listen Notes indexes millions of podcasts and hundreds of millions of episodes so you can search spoken audio the way Google searches web pages. Unlike the name-only search inside Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it is episode-centric: type a topic and you get the individual episodes where it is discussed, with filters for length, language, genre, date, and more. The site also offers curated playlists, listen-later queues that export over RSS, and a Listen Score ranking signal that PR teams use to size up a show's influence.
The business runs on ads plus a developer API that serves 15,200+ companies and developers (provider-claimed), with official client libraries on GitHub for Python, Ruby, PHP, Swift, and Scala. A free API tier covers light experimentation and paid tiers scale to enterprise, though episode transcripts remain thin (under 1% of episodes), so search leans on titles and descriptions rather than spoken content. It was founded in 2017 by Wenbin Fang, who built it after failing to find a good podcast search tool as a listener himself.
What it can do
- Episode-level full-text search across 4M+ podcasts (provider-claimed)
- Filters by length, language, genre, date, region, and more
- Listen Score popularity ranking per podcast
- REST API with official client libraries (Python, Ruby, PHP, Swift, Scala)
- Typeahead search endpoint for autocomplete UX
- Listen Later playlists exportable over RSS
Setup
- Search free at listennotes.com with no account.
- Create a Listen Later playlist to queue episodes across shows.
- Sign up for a free API key to test search, typeahead, and episode endpoints.
- Upgrade to a paid API tier for production quotas.
Prerequisites
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (TIER verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: operating since 2017 (founder Wenbin Fang, Delaware C-Corp), maintained official API client libraries across 5+ languages, documented REST API with free/pro/enterprise tiers, and consistent third-party coverage (Software Engineering Daily interview, LifeHacker/TechCrunch coverage). Strengths: long track record, transparent product and API docs, real developer adoption. Docked for: (1) key scale numbers (4M podcasts, 15,200+ API customers) are provider-claimed; (2) transcript coverage is thin so search depth is limited to metadata. License: proprietary (SaaS + paid API).
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 5.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Operating since 2017; founder Wenbin Fang, Delaware C-Corp; consistent press coverage (SED, LifeHacker).
- · Documented REST API with free/pro/enterprise tiers; official client libraries maintained.
- · Scale numbers (4M podcasts, 15,200+ API customers) are provider-claimed.
- · Transcript coverage <1% of episodes; search leans on titles/descriptions.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.