How to find the RSS feed for a podcast

A podcast is an RSS feed: an XML file listing the show's title, description, artwork and every episode with a link to its audio file. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other app are readers of that file.

That is why podcasting is open in a way most media is not. No single company owns distribution, and anyone with the URL can subscribe from any app.

The big apps hide the URL because they would rather you stayed inside them. It exists regardless, and for most shows it is findable in a couple of minutes.

If it is your podcast, the feed URL is in your hosting account, usually on the show settings page and often labelled RSS Feed or Distribution.

That URL is what you submit to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the rest. You submit it once per directory, and every future episode appears automatically because the directory re-reads the feed.

Keep it somewhere you can find it. You will need it again when you submit to a new directory, when someone asks for it, and if you ever change hosts.

Paste it into a feed validator before submitting anywhere. Directories reject feeds with missing required fields, and the validator tells you exactly which, which is far quicker than waiting for a rejection.

Apple does not show the feed URL in its apps, but it does expose it through a public lookup. Find the show on podcasts.apple.com and take the numeric id from the URL, the digits after id in the address.

Then visit itunes.apple.com/lookup?id= followed by that number. The response is a small block of JSON, and the field called feedUrl is the podcast's RSS feed.

This works for any show listed in Apple Podcasts, which is nearly all of them, and it takes about thirty seconds once you have done it once.

There are also free websites that do exactly this lookup with a search box, if you would rather not read JSON.

Spotify does not expose feed URLs at all. If a show is on both Spotify and Apple, use the Apple lookup above and you will have the same feed.

If a show is Spotify-exclusive, there is genuinely no public feed. Exclusivity means the audio is not distributed by RSS, and no tool can produce a feed that does not exist.

The same is true of shows behind a paywall or inside a single app. Private and premium feeds do exist, and they are personal URLs issued to a subscriber rather than something you can look up.

Always try the show's own website first. Many podcasts link their feed directly, often with a small RSS icon in the footer or on a subscribe page.

If a show has a website but no visible feed link, the feed is often declared in the page's HTML. Open the page source and search for application/rss+xml, which is how a page advertises its feed to browsers.

Searching the source for the word feed, or for .xml, finds it in most of the remaining cases.

Common feed addresses are also worth trying directly: adding /feed, /rss or /feed.xml to the site address works surprisingly often, particularly on WordPress sites.

Once you have a feed URL, paste it into any podcast app's add-by-URL option and you are subscribed, without going through a directory at all.