How to Get Guests to Pitch Your Podcast

The screen a guest runs, and what it removes

Four checks, applied in the order a stranger meets them, each one narrowing the survivors of the last. Every row below is the number of shows removed at that step, out of a real directory rather than a hypothetical one.

Read the fourth row against the first three. Being unreadable, silent or unreachable removes fewer shows combined than publishing nothing a stranger can check, and those first three are the ones hosts worry about. Nobody worries about the fourth, because from inside a show it does not look like a problem at all: you know your format, your regular listeners know your format, and the only person who cannot tell is the one deciding whether to write to you.

The other three are worth fixing too, and they are not equally cheap. 22 shows had a feed we could not read, which is usually a hosting or redirect problem and needs someone technical for an hour. 79 had published nothing in about six months, which is not a copy fix. 35 more published no route beyond a homepage, which takes a minute. The fourth takes a sentence.

The shows that book guests and cannot prove it

Here is the part that made this worth publishing. Of the shows that fail the evidence check, we hold at least one episode's show notes for 232 of them. In 52 of those, which is 22%, the notes credit a named guest.

Those shows book guests. They are doing exactly the thing a guest is looking for. And the guest never finds out, because show notes are one tap deeper than a title and nobody opens them while screening thirty shows.

That is roughly one in five of the invisible group, and it is the cheapest fix in this entire article: the information already exists, in your own feed, in the wrong field. Move the guest's name from the notes into the episode title and a stranger sees it in the first screen of your show in any podcast app.

The mirror of that number is a caution about our own measurement, and it belongs on the page rather than in a footnote. We are reading feeds, not minds. A show with no visible evidence is a show that has published nothing checkable, which is a much weaker statement than "does not want guests", and 52 shows in this corpus are the proof of the gap. Every figure here is about what is visible.

Saying it and showing it are two different checks

A guest can learn your format from two places: what your show description claims, and what your recent episode titles show. They almost never agree. Across the 338 feeds we read, 64 describe a guest format and 51 credit a guest in recent titles, and only 10 do both.

The top row is the smallest and it is the one to aim at. Those 10 shows average 85 on our openness score against 44 for the shows doing neither, a gap of 41 points, and every one of them survives the whole screen. Nothing about that is a reward for being a big show. It is a reward for two pieces of copy.

The middle two rows are the interesting failures. 54 shows say it and never show it, which reads to a careful guest as marketing rather than format. 41 show it and never say it, which is better but relies on the guest scrolling. Neither is wrong; both are half a job, and the half that is missing is always the cheaper half to add.

The door, and the one almost nobody publishes

A guest who has decided to write to you now has to find out where. Across 338 feeds, 78% publish an address in the feed itself, which is the route almost every guesting guide mentions last. 9% publish nothing we could find at all.

And then there is the row that surprised us: 4 shows out of 338 publish an actual guest pitch form. Not a general contact page, a form that exists to take a pitch.

We are not going to pretend a form is the right answer for every show, because it is not: a form filters out the effortless pitches and some of the excellent ones with them, and it needs somebody to read it. What the number says is narrower and more useful. If you publish one, you are almost alone in doing so, and a guest who has screened thirty shows and found one door built for them will notice.

The cheap version of the same idea costs nothing: put the words in your feed. A show description that ends with a sentence naming how to pitch it is a contact route, an evidence signal and a filter in one line, and it travels everywhere your feed goes.

What to change, in the order it pays

Every item here is derived from a check above, and every one is something a stranger can verify from your published feed within a minute of finding you.

• Put the guest's name in the episode title, not only the notes. This is first because it is the biggest measured loss and the smallest edit. 52 shows in this corpus credit a guest in the notes of an episode whose title credits nobody, and to a researching guest every one of them looks like a show that does not book guests.
• Say it in the show description. 19% of the feeds we read describe a guest format. One sentence, in the description that ships with every episode everywhere, is the difference between the bottom row of the table above and the row that scores 41 points higher.
• Publish an address in the feed. 35 shows survived the liveness check and then failed on this. The feed's own owner or managing editor field is read by every directory and every research tool, including ours, and a homepage link is not a substitute.
• Name who you want to hear from. "We interview operators who have shipped something" is a filter and an invitation at once, and it is the only item on this list that improves the quality of what arrives rather than the quantity.
• Keep publishing, visibly. 79 shows in this directory read as finished. If yours is between seasons, an episode saying so is worth more to a stranger than any amount of back catalogue, because the check they run is a date.
• Consider a pitch form, with your eyes open. 4 shows publish one. It is a real filter and it is real work, and it is the only item here that can make things worse if nobody reads the submissions.

None of this is about deserving guests more. It is about being legible to the ones already looking, and legibility is the part of the problem that is entirely in your hands.

What this measurement cannot tell you

Three limits, and they matter because the advice above is only as good as the thing being measured.

• We read feeds, not shows. Everything here is a claim about what is published and checkable, never about what a host wants. The 52 shows crediting guests only in their notes are the clearest evidence that the two come apart, and they are in the corpus precisely so that gap is visible instead of assumed.
• The title check is deliberately strict and the evidence check is deliberately narrow. A named person after "with" or "featuring", or the words guest or interview, in one of the recent episodes we read. A show that credits its guest after a pipe at the end of a title reads as no evidence, so every count above is a floor rather than a ceiling.
• 360 shows is a directory, not the medium. It is skewed toward shows a guest would plausibly pitch, which if anything makes the losses here conservative: the wider a list gets, the more of it fails these checks.

What it does tell you is the shape of the screen, and the shape is what the advice hangs on. Most shows are not filtered out for being small or busy or gated. They are filtered out for being unreadable to a stranger, and that is a copy problem with a copy fix.

Sources and benchmark date

Every figure above is derived at build time from our own read of the public feeds behind 360 podcasts between July 16, 2026 to August 23, 2026, not typed in. The method, the limitations and the raw data are public:

• Which Podcasts Actually Book Guests? (our study)

  Original analysis of the 338 readable feeds inside a 360-show directory. Source for the openness score, the guest-evidence definition and the contact-route data every figure on this page is computed from. Method, limitations and the full dataset are published with it under CC BY 4.0.

• Does This Podcast Interview Guests?

  The says/shows square from the guest's side, including the show-notes gap this page turns around: how much of "we could not tell" was really "we did not look in the right place".

• How Many Podcasts Should You Pitch?

  The same four checks read the other way. It is the page your prospective guests are effectively working from, which is why the screen above is the screen it describes.

• How to Contact a Podcast Host

  The full contact-route split behind this page's door section: which routes shows actually publish, measured across the same 338 feeds.

Frequently asked questions