Podcasts Looking for Guests

What “looking for guests” can honestly mean

A podcast is open to a guest pitch in one of three ways, and they are worth separating because only one of them is common:

• It publishes a guest submission form on its own website. Unambiguous, and rare: exactly 4 of the 336 shows in our directory do it. If a show has one, use it and skip everything below, because it is the process the host chose.
• It publishes evidence that it books outside guests, usually a guest's name in a recent episode title or a description of itself as an interview show. Checkable, and common enough to be useful.
• It takes guests but publishes nothing about it. Extremely common, and invisible from the outside. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence here, which is why the list below is not a list of shows that refuse guests.

The second category is the one this page lists, and the numbers put it in perspective. Of the 314 feeds we read, 99 (32%) published visible evidence of booking guests. The other 68% published nothing a guest can check, which is a statement about what is knowable, not a verdict on those shows. Separately, 23% had not released an episode in roughly six months, and a dormant feed is not a route in whatever its back catalogue looks like.

The 54 shows, grouped by topic

Every show below cleared three filters: it publishes checkable evidence of booking outside guests, it is still releasing episodes, and it has a page here where you can read the evidence for yourself before you pitch. Within each topic they are ordered by our openness score, most open first. The list is regenerated from the feeds, so it changes when they do.

This is not the whole directory. It is the 54 shows that are simultaneously still publishing, evidenced, and documented here. There are 336 shows in total, and the ones with no published guest signal are not ruled out, only unproven. To search all of them by topic, use the finder below.

Pitch the big independent shows, not the small ones

The standard advice is to start small because large shows will not take a cold pitch. Scored against what shows actually publish, that advice was backwards, and this is the most useful finding in the whole study:

• Established shows, roughly 500+ episodes, scored 58/100 on openness to an outside guest. Smaller shows scored 45/100.
• The barrier that mattered was not audience size but a booking desk. Network-run shows scored 40/100 against 51/100 for independent ones, and 21% of the corpus is network-run.
• The most open cohort in the corpus was the big independent show: 66 of them, averaging 64/100.

That is why each entry above says whether the show is independent or network-run. A long-running independent show with visible guest episodes is the best-value pitch in this category, and it is the one most guests talk themselves out of sending.

How to check a show before you spend a pitch on it

Whether a show came off this list or out of your own head, the same four checks take about ninety seconds and will save you most of your wasted pitches:

• Is it still publishing? Look at the date on the most recent episode, not the artwork. Roughly a quarter of the feeds we read had gone quiet for six months.
• Does it have guests at all? Scan five recent episode titles. If none of them names a person other than the host, it may still be a solo show.
• Is there a booking desk? A network or media brand in the author field usually means a producer decides, not the host, and cold pitches route differently.
• Is there a published route in? A guest form on the show's own site beats every other contact method, because it is the one the show asked for.

The last one is worth insisting on. A show that publishes a submission form has told you exactly how it wants to be approached, and using it puts your pitch in the pile the host actually reads.

What to send once you have a shortlist

A target list is not the hard part, and a bad pitch to a good show is a wasted good show. The pattern that works is short and specific: name the episode you actually listened to and why it landed, say in one line who you are and what you can talk about that this audience wants, offer two or three angles rather than a topic, and make it easy to say yes with dates and a link to your one-sheet.

What does not work is the mail-merge that opens with praise for the show in general, describes you at length, and asks the host to figure out what you would talk about. Hosts read a hundred of those.

We publish free tools for each step of that, none of which need an account: a pitch generator that drafts an opener for a specific show, a grader that scores a pitch you have already written, and a one-sheet builder that assembles the page hosts ask for.

How this list was built, and what it cannot tell you

Every show here comes from our own directory of 336 podcasts sourced from public Apple Podcasts data. We fetched each show's public RSS feed, read the feed's own description, publishing cadence and recent episode titles, and scored openness to an outside guest from those signals alone. 314 feeds were readable; 22 were not, and an unreadable feed is counted as unknown rather than as a negative.

• It cannot tell you a show is accepting guests right now. It tells you the show has booked them and is still publishing.
• It cannot see a show that books guests quietly. Plenty do, and they are not on this list because nothing in their feed says so.
• It is a snapshot, not a feed monitor. The feeds behind it were last read on July 16, 2026, and each entry links to a page that shows the episodes the signal came from.
• It is not a ranking of quality. Openness to a cold pitch is not the same as a show being worth pitching, and only you can judge fit.

The full method, the caveats and the raw data are published openly under CC BY 4.0, including the per-show scores. If you disagree with the scoring, you can re-run it.

Frequently asked questions